This sampler contains short excerpts from the following forthcoming books from Cornell University Press. Full details about each book are available on our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko, Enlightenment and the Gasping City: Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray, available June Rachel Applebaum, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia, available April Eliot Borenstein, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism, available April Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Eds., Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, available April
RUSSIAN & EURASIAN STUDIES sampler
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CORNELLPRESS.CORNELL.EDU
2019
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Enlightenment and the Gasping City Mongolian Buddhism at a Time of Environmental Disarray
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
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Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [[CIP to come]]
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Contents
Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration and Terms
ix xiii
Introduction 1 1. Dust and Obscuration in a New Economy
24
2. A History of Enlightenment in Mongolia
41
3. Buddhism, Purification, and the Nation
65
4. Ignorance and Blur
83
5. Networks and Visibility
98
6. Karma and Purification
119
7. Removing Blockages, Increasing Energy
142
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v iii Contents
8. Temple Critiques
159
9. White Foods, Purification, and Enlightenment
179
Conclusion: Stillness and Movement
196
Glossary 205 Notes 209 References 213 Index 000
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Introduction
It’s early 2010 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city, and the winter is brutally cold, with temperatures plunging to minus 40°C and below. This winter t here is a terrible zud1 with conditions so bad that by the end of the winter over 8.5 million animals, almost 20 percent of the national herd, will have died (UNDP 2010, 2). The only animals I have seen for the last few months, except humans, are the city’s imperturbable sparrows and the stray dogs that huddle in the city’s open rubbish-collection points for warmth. It has been well below zero since early October, and by January even the pine trees have lost their needles. It is evening and I have decided to brave the nighttime temperatures to go see the film Avatar, the global hype around which having enveloped Ulaanbaatar too. Some friends pick me up, and we arrive, a little late, to a packed cinema. In the movie we are transported to an intensely colorful world with luminescent forests and the explicit interspecies connections of an imaginary, utopic iteration of our planet. H umans are the foes, waging war on an alien world to meet their own energy needs.
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2 Introduction
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In the end they lose the b attle and are sent back to their “dying world,” our earth. The film finishes and we shuffle out, a little dazed, in search of my friend’s car. The shock devastates; to walk out from technicolor immersion to the dark, freezing city choked in smog. As the frigid air hits my exposed upper face I feel the temperature as sharp, then numbing pain. This sensation is accompanied by the strongly acrid smell of burning coal and the near vertigo that comes with walking on a thick layer of ice, ever on the verge. The audio landscape is saturated with humming engines and car horns as drivers haphazardly navigate the overcrowded, deteriorating streets. The population of the Soviet-planned capital has more than doubled since the end of the socialist period, and the city is buckling under the pressure. Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution is worst in the ger (nomadic felt tents) areas that are located to the north, west, and east. Not reached by the city’s coal- fired, Soviet-built central heating systems that heat the capital’s centrally located apartment blocks, these ger neighborhoods must provision themselves with inefficient cast-iron stoves burning coal from Mongolia’s coal mines. Because the temperatures are below zero for most of the year t hese stoves must run day and night to keep ger-area dwellers from freezing. The ger districts’ built environment, consisting of gers and small cheaply built concrete buildings arranged inside wood-fenced compounds (khashaa) that are connected by unpaved roads, provides little protection for residents from the outside air. T hese neighborhoods h ouse Ulaanbaatar’s poorer inhabitants, and the worsening air pollution is a tangible consequence and correlate of growing social inequalities. My apartment is an old, blue-gray five-story Soviet building in the center of the city, a bus or taxi ride away from one of my main field sites, Jampa Ling, a newly built Dharma Center2 located at the edge of the western ger areas. On a particularly bad day in November 2009, the air outside of Jampa Ling is thick with smog, and it feels distressingly like being in a h ouse fire. The atmosphere is so saturated with particulates that I cannot see across the street. In these conditions the effects are immediate: the smoke burns my eyes and lungs, and I contract a heaving cough from being outside for not much more than ten minutes. Mongolian friends tell me that it is just my lungs trying to clear out the bad air and that a fter a while they will stop trying and adapt to the air pollution. They are right. Within a month my cough has stopped. My frequent dreams of drowning, from which I wake up gasping for air, continue.
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Introduction 3
As in most cities affected by chronic problems, life in the polluted winter months continues as usual. Though the city is insinuated by a shrouding of dark smoke, people go to work, children attend school, and those living in the ger areas continue to burn coal as their only source of heating. My friend Tuya tells me in 2015 that her friends and acquaintances make jokes about their own air pollution amnesia. It is too cold to fix infrastructure in the winter, so problems need to be repaired in summer when it is warm enough. But everyone forgets about the pollution, she says, as soon as the air is clear again in the warmer months. During the winter I, just like everyone e lse, continue my work as usual. I travel around the city to talk to lay Buddhists that are regular students at Dharma Centers and t hose that occasionally visit local temples. I attend ritual activities at t emples, Buddhist centers and sacred sites. I discuss Buddhism with taxi d rivers, friends, and acquaintances. Inside the newly built, colorfully decorated Dharma Centers, inattentive of the outside pollution, I sit on the carpeted floor and learn meditation with other lay Buddhists. The teacher tells us to imagine that our mind is like a clear blue sky and that our thoughts are like passing clouds. The students are told to perceive the thoughts like the clouds, letting them pass, rather than engaging or clinging to them. The clarity and brightness of the sky is symbolically linked to the ideal qualities of the mind. Landlocked between China and Russia, Mongolia’s landscape consists of steppe, desert, mountains, lakes, and some forest in the north. The sky (tenger) is wide and unobstructed. It plays a key role in the country’s national imagination and has a long history of being worshipped. Mongolia’s sky, as many a proud Mongol tells me, is clear for an average of 250 days a year. Buddhist prayer scarves are commonly colored bright blue (tsenkher) symbolizing reverence for the sky and its qualities. Ovoos, sacred rock cairns, are scattered all across the country and connect the mountaintops in veneration to the heavens. On ovoos, poles are mounted, from which prayer flags wave, catching the air in order to multiply blessings. The clarity of the sky and the light that it bestows are frequently discussed in Buddhist sūtras3 (sudar). It is pres ent in Buddhist iconography and utilized metonymically in teachings to lay Buddhists and religious specialists. At Dharma Centers bright light and clear skies are explicitly linked to purification (ariutgal) practices that are thought to help individuals reach enlightenment. Purification, along with light and clarity, are closely connected to enlightenment, both in its association with
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4 Introduction
the seventeenth-century Enlightenment movement within Europe and its meanings within Buddhist soteriology (Sneath 2009). In a country where the clear sky is so revered, and a city where the heavens routinely recede behind veiling smog, this book w ill explore the literal and figurative connections between light and its obscuration among urban Mongols. In Mongolia, light and connected concepts are seen in opposition to darkness, dirt, corruption, stagnation, and pollution in its spiritual and environmental meanings. The dimming of light in the form of dirt, pollution, and dust opposes light, purity, and enlightenment, along with movement and wind. By exploring the use, understandings, and oppositions of light (gerel) and spiritual pollution / air pollution (buzarlal, agaarin bokhirdol), this book will illustrate how contemporary Mongols approach religiosity in a city enshrouded in an amorphous substance that is neither material nor immaterial. By focusing on light, its intersections and its oppositions, this ethnography will attempt to illuminate Buddhist practices and beliefs in a living urban context wherein worsening air pollution and growing social inequalities ubiquitously and viscerally demand consideration.
Light and Enlightenment
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Before the socialist period Buddhist institutions were dotted throughout Mongolia in key positions for trade and communication with nomadic herders (Moses 1977). They were the custodians of enlightenment. Within the temple walls lived reincarnation lineages that were believed to have reached such high levels of attainment that they could choose their own rebirths. High lamas w ere thought to be Bodhisattvas—beings that indeterminately delay complete enlightenment to help o thers be free from suffering and the endless rebirths of saṃsāra4 (orchlon). These lamas were called Gegeen, meaning daylight, splendor, and brightness (Sneath 2009). They, along with other monastic teachers, taught the knowledge and practices needed to follow the Vajrayāna lineage of Buddhism, sometimes known as “the thunderbolt school.” This school is believed by its followers to contain highly volatile rituals and methods that blaze a quicker path to enlightenment. In the pre-socialist period Buddhist institutions were the custodians of soteriological praxis and passed this knowledge on to the next generations within monastic communities through teachings and secret tantric rituals
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Introduction 5
carried out within the temple walls. For t hose Mongolian pastoralists who visited monasteries—some of the only permanent dwellings in the country— to trade and to seek medicine or protection, the lights of the hundreds of butter lamps and the ornately represented mystical powers of the reincarnation lineages must have left a striking impression. In the 1930s, as the socialist government began waging a campaign of brutal repression against Buddhism, the term enlightenment ( gegeerel) was appropriated to mean secular education (Bawden 1997). It, along with power, influence, and property, was wrestled, in a campaign lasting almost twenty years, from the hands of the monastics and high lamas. The socialist state was now able to say who could and who could not become “enlightened” and, perhaps more importantly, how. As the term transitioned to refer to socialist education in the sense of the European Enlightenment, knowledge became democratized (Kaplonski 2014). Ordinary women and men could become “enlightened” and could teach others how to do so. Enlightenment under socialism became a pursuit not only available to all Mongols but also morally incumbent upon them. Accompanying this transition, the socialist state began providing electricity for the first time in the countryside. This introduction of electricity, or “Lenin’s Light” (Ilyichiin Gerel), as it was known, to the countryside in the 1930s and 1940s was used to metaphorically link the socialist regime with “light” (gerel) and with the western idea of enlightenment as both transcendent and illuminating (Sneath 2009). Just as the Buddhist missionaries before them had believed that they carried the light of Buddhism to the dark north (Kollmar-Paulenz 2014), the socialist state saw itself as bringing light to what they saw as the “backward” pastoralists of rural Mongolia (Bruun and Narangoa 2006). In the state’s view, in order for progress to occur along Marxist economic lines, pastoralists had to be educated and urbanized. As such, increasing urbanization accompanied the electrification of the countryside, facilitating schooling for the c hildren of herders and supporting the administrative functioning of the new regime (Bruun and Narangoa 2006). If the idea of light during socialism was mobilized by the government to mean education and “enlightening” activities, t here is another way in which this metaphor can be used to elucidate the period. As electrification “enlightened” the countryside, the state increasingly used surveillance to expose those who did not fit within the narratives of socialist progress. Light provided illumination, but it also generated exposure. During the purges of the
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6 Introduction
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1930s, thousands of people were taken away at night, often never to be seen by loved ones again (Buyandelger 2013). The torchlight carried by state officials at once exposed its victims and obscured the perpetrators of vio lence (Kaplonski 2008). This is another way that the socialist period brought “light” to Mongolia. While this light was shone most intensely during the purges of the 1930s, the state never fully relaxed its agenda of the persecution of religious activities. It continued seeking out and persecuting those carrying out illicit religious activities right up until the 1980s (Buyandelger 2013). Along with the birthing of the nascent democratic movement, the end of the socialist period saw the rapid demolition of state infrastructure and the socialist economic sphere more broadly (Rossabi 2005; Sneath 2002). Wages became infrequent or stopped altogether for public servants, and privatizing infrastructure struggled to keep up with regular demands. Electricity shortages became common across the country leaving many households with patchy and irregular light. As Pedersen (2011) notes, during the sharp economic crises of the 1990s, electricity shortages were interpreted cosmologically by some Mongols to indicate the coming “age of darkness” (kharankhui üye), a period of increasing difficulties. During my fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar in 2009–2010, 2013, 2015, and 2016, the city still suffered from inconsistent electricity and blackouts. However, the far greater threat to “light” in the city is the physical dimming of the once abundant natural light as the seasonal winter pollution unfurls itself like a blanket over the city, transforming Ulaanbaatar into one of the five worst cities for air pollution in the world (Guttikunda et al. 2013). Coal, the very source of energy used to create electric light and heat in the city, is now the top source of winter air pollution. The smoke from Ulaanbaatar’s coal-fired power stations creates light in the home while diminishing the visibility and clarity of the air outside. Hearth fires in the extensive ger areas, necessary for heat and cooking, further saturate the haze. Following the economic fluctuations that accompanied the end of socialism, the population in the capital has risen from around 560,000 in 1990 to 1.35 million in 2016. Ulaanbaatar now is home to around half of the national population, and the infrastructure is creaking from the strain. This increase in population is partly due to a number of terrible zuds that occurred from 1999 to 2002 and during my fieldwork in the winter of 2009–2010. The zud of the winter of 2009–2010 affected almost three-quarters of Mongolia’s land, decimating 8.5 million heads of livestock, nearly 20 percent of the national
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Introduction 7
herd (Janes and Chuluundorj 2015). T hese winters have the greatest effect on the livelihoods of the poorer herders and female-headed h ouseholds, whose livestock numbers are lower and who have very little money to buy feed for the cattle when conditions necessitate it (UNDP 2010). In the early ere dismantled and state-run transportation and 1990s collective farms w provisioning that used to buffer the blow of t hese extreme winters ceased to function (Sneath 1998). Partly due to the lack of transportation, the size of rangelands decreased, causing degradation in Mongolia’s pasturelands (Lkhagvadorj et al. 2013). Herders living on degraded pastures without the same level of mobility are more susceptible to livestock deaths in harsh winters (Sneath 1998). The loss of a herd often means migration to the capital to borrow money from relatives and/or to look for work. Many, after being reliant on the hospitality of their kin, realize that they are unskilled in an urban environment and find it difficult to transition to urban life. It was estimated in 2010 that over 50 percent of the capital’s population now lives in the ger areas that surround the city (UNDP 2010). These areas make up 83 percent of Ulaanbaatar’s built urban area (World Bank 2015, 1). As luxury shopping malls, expensive goods, and apartment complexes have cropped up to service the new urban elite in the center and south of the city, the ger areas have expanded—lacking basic infrastructure, such as running water and waste-management systems. Since the time that I began doing fieldwork in 2009 there has been a visible increase in segregation in the city. The distance between the wealthy sections of the inner city and the outer edges has increased in time, effort, and cost, due to the ever-worsening traffic jams that clog the city’s arterial roads, increases in transport costs, and the privatization of services such as schools for the wealthy. The main developments expanding to the south of the city promise lower pollution levels and a lifestyle likened to Seoul and Tokyo. What connects the center and the surrounding neighborhoods is the suffocating winter smog, which effects, to varying extents, all city residents. As the city’s population has more than doubled, the long winters have become increasingly unhealthy for the city’s residents due to pollution from traffic and burning rubbish and the smoke of coal burned for heating and cooking in the ger areas. Ger neighborhood residents need to burn around two bags of coal and half a bag of wood a day to survive the harsh winters (Hamilton 2011). If people cannot afford it, they burn tires, fences, or rubbish, whatever they can to prevent themselves from freezing in winter temperatures
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8 Introduction
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averaging below minus 25°C. In 2011 the Mongolian government admitted that the pollution problem had become so bad that it had reached “disaster” status (Hamilton 2011), with epidemiologists saying that hospitalization from respiratory-related complaints was causing a public health crisis (Jacob 2011). Conservative estimates state that one in ten p eople who die in Ulaanbaatar die from diseases related to air pollution in the city (Ryan et al. 2013). The air pollution has also been strongly correlated with an increase in spontaneous abortions in the winter months (Enkhmaa et al. 2014). Due to an increasing awareness of the effects that hazardous air quality can have on an unborn child, some doctors instruct w omen who have had a series of miscarriages to live in the countryside during their pregnancy (Fukuda 2017). For t hose living in ger areas, around one-quarter of Mongolia’s entire population, the air quality is poorest. For the urban poor, health problems caused by continuous exposure to particulates are compounded by poor access to health care. During winter the air quality index (AQI), used to measure pollution particulates on a scale from 0 to 500, is exceeded daily. On the fifteenth of September each year, additional coal-fired power stations used to heat the city’s apartment blocks are turned on, and these power stations run u ntil the fifteenth of May the following spring. As Ulaanbaatar is located between mountains the freezing temperatures create a thermal inversion, trapping the smoke from ger stoves, power stations, exhaust from cars, and burning rubbish. To give a sense of how bad the pollution is, Beijing, as of October 2013, issues a red alert if the air pollution reaches particulates of more than 500 in one day, above 300 over two days, or an AQI of over 200 for four days in a row (Tiezzi 2015). A red alert means that construction sites and schools are closed for the period. Ulaanbaatar’s air during winter has high daily averages of 750 μg/m3 (Guttikunda et al. 2013). In spite of this devastating seasonal problem, in 2015, due to the economic crisis, the government ended its funding to the Clean Energy Fund, a program that was created to deal with the pollution problem. As smog infests the city in the long and cold winter, thermal inversion prevents the polluted air from escaping the valley it lies in, save through the exceptional achievement of unusually strong winds. When I asked p eople what they thought was the opposite of environmental pollution many replied that it was wind, as wind could rid the city of the air pollution. In winter the urban environment has become one of stagnation, but a kind of stagnation
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Introduction 9
that contains within it unseen and potentially dangerous movement. Many believe that spirits capable of affecting p eople’s fortunes are present in the city. Stagnation and immobility have powerful imaginative resonance in Mongolia. For Mongols immobility is associated with laziness (Benwell 2013). At the same time, stagnation is associated with the blockage of one’s fortune (Humphrey and Ujeed 2012).
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10 Introduction
The symbol of the wind horse (khiimori) is common throughout the country, printed on Buddhist flags that are placed upon ovoos and in high places where they can flutter in the wind. The connection of the h orse to wind has a strong allegorical resonance in the imagination of Mongols who connect life-sustaining nomadic movement to horses. One’s khiimori is one’s internal energies. This energy is thought to be influenced from outside and can be adversely affected by external contamination (Humphrey and Ujeed 2012). Khiimori is associated with metaphors of air and movement. It is thought that in order to maintain one’s khiimori a person should follow the movements of the sun. For instance, it is common for m others to encourage their children to rise with the morning sun as aligning oneself with natural movements is thought to “raise their” khiimori (Humphrey and Ujeed 2012, 160). If one experiences a period of bad luck it could be thought that their khiimori is “lying down.” A person’s khiimori may be weakened due to normal fluctuations or because it has been polluted by outside forces. If outside forces are to blame, a lama or a shaman can carry out specific readings and rituals to cleanse one’s khiimori (Humphrey and Ujeed 2012, 156). In the context of the winter city, a lack of light is inextricably associated with a lack of wind. Pollution hangs in the air aided by a lack of sufficient air and movement. Movement and wind create clarity. These associations of purity with wind and clarity have a strong resonance in Buddhist teaching lineages both inside and outside Mongolia. Just as the clarity of mind is linked to a clear blue sky, one’s breath is the primary place where one is clearly interdependent with one’s surroundings. Breath animates and connects. The pollution of the air, with its actual limitations on light and breath, creates obscurations in both cosmological and tangible ways. Pollution blocks, suffocates, and delimits.
Urban Life in the Anthropocene
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We are no longer poised on the edge of the abyss, contemplating its vastness . . . Instead . . . we have discovered that we are already falling inside the abyss, which is not pure empty space, but instead the fiery interior of a hyperobject . . . Flying through the universe in the space shuttle of modernity, we find out that we w ere driving with the breaks on, revving the engine while the fuselage lies rusting in a junkyard. (Morton 2013, 160)
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Introduction 11
In early 2009 the east coast of Australia, where I was traveling before I left for Mongolia, was experiencing a heat wave. The Department of Meteorology in Melbourne measured three consecutive days above 43°C (109°F) with the highest temperature reaching 45.1°C (113.2°F), the third hottest day in the city’s history. The bushfires started when meteorologists registered the hottest temperatures since documentation began, including in Melbourne, where an all-time high of 46.4°C (115.5°F) was recorded. The wildfires that began on that day killed 147 people, and they w ere the worst recorded in Australia’s history. T hese fires released an estimated 8.5 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (Williams et al. 2011), adding to the problem of what many commentators are now calling “runaway climate change”—wherein rising temperatures cause the further release of carbon dioxide through events such as wildfires and the release of natural gas from the now melting Siberian permafrost. In Australia, the incredibly hot temperatures in the southeast, along with the dry conditions that enabled the fires to intensify, formed part of a complex of factors that are the preconditions for “megafires.” These tremendous fires are fueled by drought and temperature extremes and are both the result of and further contribute to global warming (Williams et al. 2011). Megafires are so vast that they dwarf previously known natural disasters. They burn so ferociously that they irreversibly damage landscapes, even in Australia where ecosystems have evolved to regenerate through fire. In early 2010, Mongolia was experiencing a natural disaster caused by an incredibly cold winter and the previous summer’s drought. In the depths of the winter, Mongolia’s government had declared a national emergency as the country’s livestock began to be decimated by a terrible zud. The zud of 2010, like others of the twentieth century, was produced by a lack of rainfall in the summer months and was followed by inclement weather conditions, such as heavy snowfall, in the winter months (Janes and Chuluundorj 2015). Of the ten zuds that have been recorded since 1944, five have occurred since 1990, indicating that their increasing frequency is related to broader patterns of climate change produced by global warming (Janes and Chuluundorj 2015). The devastating effects of these disasters have been amplified by the dismantling of farming collectives (negdel) in the early 1990s as Mongolia switched to a capitalist economy. As a result, herders have now lost access to the state-run transportation that used to buffer the blow of these extreme winters (Sneath 1998). The dismantling of the negdel, along with growing inequalities in the
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12 Introduction
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countryside, has created conditions that aggravate problems with overgrazing, conflicts around grazing pastures and water, trespassing, and the theft of animals, all of which leave herders vulnerable to the extreme conditions caused by global warming (Janes and Chuluundorj 2015). In both of these disasters other-than-human forces had a profound effect on human and nonhuman lives. A lack of rainfall was a precondition for both, along with temperature extremes. T hese climatic conditions are not part of the “normal” weather cycles in human history. Human activities since the Industrial Revolution have radically altered the global climate, which is now, in turn, dramatically influencing human lives. Since the eighteenth century, humans as a species have had such a measurable impact on the ecosystems and the geology of the planet that many geologists argue that it should be designated as a new era, departing from the Holocene, called the Anthropocene. Though still a subject of debate among geologists, this era’s commencement has generally been linked to two key dates. The first being around 1784, the year that geologists have traced the residue of carbon from the coal-fired industries of the Industrial Revolution to the remotest regions of the world. And the second date 1945, when the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused radioactive material to be deposited all over the earth’s crust umans grew expo(Morton 2013). From about 1950 onward, the impact of h nentially in intensity in a period some scholars refer to as the G reat Acceleration. From the middle of the twentieth century, the net effect of h uman activity has, despite or due to intended motives, been the destruction of ecosystems, the release of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere, the acidification and depopulation of the oceans, and rapid deforestation. There have been several renamings of the Anthropocene by philosophers and social scientists, some of whom are concerned that the label merely reflects an amplification of human hubris regarding our control over the planet. These names include the Capitalocene, which foregrounds capitalism’s impact on the planet (problematically obscuring the massive industrial impact of socialist countries during the twentieth c entury—Chernobyl and the drying up of the Aral Sea come quickly to mind); the Plasticene, which foregrounds the impact of h uman rubbish; and Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016), among many others. Latour (2014) argues that the label the Anthropocene can be seen as an opportunity for anthropologists as the term irreparably destroys the perceived dichotomies between “human society” and “nature.” As he writes, in the
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Introduction 13
Anthropocene the idea of pristine nature untouched by humans has been ruptured: “there is no distant place anymore” (Latour 2014, 2). As the Anthropocene breaks apart the divide between nature and society, it contains within it a double movement. The first in the realization that h umans now deeply and profoundly affect e very part of the planet and the second in the awakening that we do not, and cannot, control the complex systems of the earth (Latour 2014). During the natural disasters above, I was living in an urban environment where I felt the shocks of the temperature extremes and experienced the resultant devastation filtered through news media. I did not have my animals die or have my livelihood destroyed. Urban dwellers tend to be buffered from intimacy with the feedback loops of calamities that are increasingly affecting herders and farmers, informing them about the changes that are happening to the environment. Urban centers are examples of the ingenuity of human niche construction, whereby an organism, such as the iconic earthworm, actively alters its environment to make that environment more habitable for itself, reducing the immediate selection pressures of natural selection (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003). In large cities, most urbanites live largely disconnected from the processes that feed them and provide them with energy. For the wealthier inhabitants of cities temperature extremes are more of an inconvenience, to be alleviated with central heating or air conditioning, than the serious threat that they are for the urban poor. As Morton writes, the poor “perceive the ecological emergency not as degrading an aesthetic picture such as world but as an accumulation of violence that nibbles at them directly” (2013, 125). Yet it is wealthy urbanites who mostly decide which resources can be mined and logged, how industry should be regulated, how economic resources should be distributed, and how a nation should interact with their neighbors. In spite of the many buffers that distance urban dwellers from broad environmental changes, the lives of even the wealthiest urban dwellers are profoundly affected by pollution. In 2016 the World Health Organization announced that air pollution is now affecting the lives of around 92 percent of the world’s human population (BBC 2016). A recent study suggested that air pollution in Africa is responsible for more deaths than malaria, malnutrition, or dirty water (Vidal 2016). In the winter of 2016–2017 northern India was covered in a toxic blanket of smog (Safi 2016). At the same time even European cities, such as Paris, had to curb urban behaviors to limit
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14 Introduction
serious air pollution problems (Willsher 2017). While the wealthy residents of Ulaanbaatar filter the air in ways not accessible to those living in ger areas, Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution profoundly influences all of its inhabitants. This ethnography will illustrate urban life in the Anthropocene. It will pay close attention to the ways that pollution, light, and purity are part of urban assemblages. As DeLanda (2016) describes them, assemblages are constituted from heterogeneous elements, which, through their interactions with one another, have emergent properties that are immanent rather than transcendent. By following the unfolding relationships that urban Mongols have with light and its obscuration this ethnography w ill explore urban religious assemblages, of which pollution is a part, in a bustling cosmopolitan capital city. Pollution intricately influences the fabric of urban lives, not only through the bodies that breathe the particulate saturated air but also in religious practices and understandings and the city’s psychological underpinnings.
The Social Life of Difficult T hings Still, on examining them with precision tools and exacting care, one may also find that some, many, or even all objects are blurry on the edges or fuzzy to the core. (Perl 2011, 444)
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The “material turn” in anthropology has questioned anthropological tendencies to view nonhuman artifacts, agents, and t hings as symbols to be interpreted. This assumption was questioned when Appadurai (1988) argued that more attention should be paid to the “social life of things”—in particular, how objects have cultural biographies that change as they transition through different “regimes of value.” Scholars, such as Miller, have suggested that a new materiality needs to investigate “how the things that people make, make p eople” (Miller 2005, 28). How, for instance, do materials craft religious life in religiously pluralistic Southeast Asia (Bautista 2012)? And what does a materialist anthropology look like when anthropologists take the worlds of their interlocutors more seriously by “thinking through things” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007)? These projects often look to h uman artifacts to explore how t hings influence social lives. Yet how does one conceptualize a “thing” as complex as air pollution or swelling oceans, which, while a part of human heritage, are
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Empire of Friends Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia
Rachel Applebaum
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
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Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a grant from the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University, which aided in the publication of this book. Publication was also made possible in part by a grant from the First Book Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Applebaum, Rachel, 1980–author. Title: Empire of friends : Soviet power and socialist internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia / Rachel Applebaum. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029905 (print) | LCCN 2018030904 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501735585 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501735592 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501735578 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Czechoslovakia—Relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Relations—Czechoslovakia. | Socialism and culture— Czechoslovakia. | Czechoslovakia— Civilization— Soviet influences. Classification: LCC DB2078.S65 (ebook) | LCC DB2078.S65 A67 2019 (print) | DDC 943.704—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029905
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Contents
Abbreviations ix Note on Translation and Transliteration
xi
Introduction: A Tank in Prague
1
1. Culture Wars
19
2. “The Land of Our Destiny”
50
3. The Legacy of the Liberation
81
4. Socialist Internationalism with a Human Face
109
5. Tourists on Tanks
137
6. The Normalization of Friendship
166
Conclusion: The Tank Turns Pink
195
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v iii Contents
Notes 201 Works Cited
241
Acknowledgments
259
Index 000
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Introduction A Tank in Prague
On July 29, 1945, Czechoslovak and Soviet dignitaries gathered on Štefánik Square in central Prague to celebrate the unveiling of a monument to the Red Army. The monument was a Soviet tank—allegedly the first to have entered Prague during the Soviet Army’s liberation of the city from German occupation two and a half months earlier. The tank stood on top of a massive granite pedestal. A bronze plaque proclaimed “eternal glory” to its deceased drivers, “eight Red Army soldiers, who sacrificed their lives for Prague’s freedom.”1 Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968: a tank on the streets of a Central European city is the paradigmatic symbol of Soviet oppression in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War. A Soviet tank in Prague on a summer’s day remains an especially indelible image of the USSR’s violent efforts to maintain control over its socialist empire in Europe. In this familiar narrative of the superpower’s use of force against its satellite states, the 1945 Monument to the Soviet Tank Crews in Prague would appear to be the foundation of Soviet hegemony in Czechoslovakia and the rest of the Eastern bloc. Yet long
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2 Introduction
Figure 1. Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia Zdeněk Fierlinger speaks at the unveiling of the Monument to the Soviet Tank Crews on Štefánik Square in Prague, July 29, 1945. Credit: Česká tisková kancelář.
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before the monument became a quintessential symbol of Soviet hard power, it was part of an audacious but far less well-known experiment in power of a different kind: the attempt to use transnational friendship to create a cohesive socialist world. This experiment, which involved cultural diplomacy, interpersonal contacts, and the trade of consumer goods across national borders behind the Iron Curtain, linked citizens of the superpower and its satellites in an empire of friends that lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Red Army’s liberation of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II marked the beginning of this wide-ranging friendship proj ect, which would transform the lives of p eople from Berlin to Vladivostok.
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Introduction 3
Figure 2. Portraits of Klement Gottwald, leader of the KSČ, and Joseph Stalin at the unveiling of the Monument to the Soviet Tank Crews on Štefánik Square in Prague, July 29, 1945. The banner says, “With the Red Army for Eternity.” Credit: Národní archiv, Fotodokumentace 1897–1981, inv. č. 1229.
The goal of this project was to unify the diverse countries in the region into a transnational, socialist community led by the Soviet Union. The Soviets and their Eastern bloc allies commonly referred to this project as “socialist internationalism” or “proletarian internationalism.” These terms originated in the mid-nineteenth century in Karl Marx’s call for “working men of all countries” to “unite” across national borders to overthrow international capitalism.2 After the October Revolution in 1917, the concept of socialist internationalism became synonymous with “world revolution”—the Bolshevik conviction that the new Soviet state’s success was dependent on a wave of revolutions breaking out across Europe and in its colonies.3 Following World War II and the creation of Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, socialist internationalism changed from an aspirational concept to a pragmatic challenge: stabilizing the new transnational socialist system in the realm of everyday life. The development of socialist internationalism in the Eastern bloc also drew on the rhetoric and practices of the Soviet campaign of “friendship of the peoples” from the 1930s, which attempted to create an overarching multicultural identity in the USSR by highlighting the achievements of individual Soviet nationalities and the love and affection among them.4
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4 Introduction
Empire of Friends tells the story of the rise and fall of this friendship proj ect between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia—a story that provides the boldest illustration of the project’s paradoxes. At the end of World War II, out of all the countries of the future Eastern bloc, Czechoslovakia offered the best chance for a successful friendship with the USSR. The Czech lands had a history of peaceful relations with their Slavic neighbor to the east; unlike Poland, which was partially annexed by the Russian Empire in the eigh teenth century and fought a war with the Soviet Union in 1920; and unlike Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, which w ere German allies for periods of 5 World War II. In 1945, a fter six years of German occupation, Czechoslovak politicians from across the political spectrum, and a majority of the public, supported a close alliance with the USSR.6 Despite these favorable indicators, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia made strange friends: the USSR touted itself as a model for Czechoslovakia’s development, yet the soon-to-be satellite state was in fact wealthier and more industrialized than the nascent superpower. In addition, Czechoslovakia had a history of close ties with the West.7 This book examines the evolution of the unlikely friendship between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, in tandem with the dramatic shifts in their alliance: from Stalinism to de-Stalinization and from the Prague Spring to Soviet occupation. The Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship project was multifaceted, encompassing everything from the coproduction of films, to collaboration between factories, to scientific exchanges. Empire of Friends focuses on the project’s influence on everyday life: the export and reception of Soviet films, music, and fine art in Czechoslovakia; the postwar construction of the mythology of the Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia; interpersonal contacts between the two countries’ citizens, including student exchanges, tourism, friendship societies, pen-pal correspondences, and veterans’ relations; and the exchange of consumer goods. T hese transnational connections reveal that the friendship project was central to the construction, the maintenance—and ultimately—the collapse of the European socialist world.
A Friendship Forged in War -1— 0— +1—
From the fall of 1944, when the Red Army liberated Romania, to the spring of 1945, when the Red Army engaged in the Berlin and Prague offensives,
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Introduction 5
rank-and-file Soviet troops, accompanied by secret police and propaganda units, helped lay the foundation for an eventual takeover by local Communist parties in the region.8 The liberation provided the Soviets with the logistical and moral basis for the construction of a new empire in the region—the empire of friends. The context of the Red Army’s liberation of Czechoslovakia underscored the country’s singular position within this new empire. In much of the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet liberation in fact meant occupation. Soviet wartime propaganda portrayed German civilians as enemies.9 When Soviet troops entered German territory in the winter of 1945, Red Army posters proclaimed the country “The Lair of the Fascist Beast.”10 Soviet commanders openly instructed their troops in both Germany and its erstwhile ally, Hungary, to avenge the terrible violence that Hitler’s forces had committed on Soviet soil. Red Army soldiers responded by committing war crimes of their own, including, most notoriously, the rape of hundreds of thousands of German and Hungarian women.11 By contrast, the six years the Czechs spent annexed to the Reich made them, from the Soviet perspective, unequivocal victims of German aggression. The situation in Slovakia was more ambiguous. For three and a half years Slovakia functioned as a German puppet state u nder the leadership of the Catholic priest Jozef Tiso. In August 1944 Slovak partisans initiated an uprising against Tiso that was brutally crushed by the German government. As a result, Slovakia, too, fell under German occupation. Following this geopolitical reversal of fortune, the Soviet government portrayed Slovaks as their natural allies.12 This background elucidates the instructions the Soviet command issued to the soldiers of the First and Fourth Ukrainian Front as they began the liberation of Slovakia in the fall of 1944: “Explain to all the soldiers that Czechoslovakia is our ally, that the forces of the Red Army must behave in a friendly manner t oward the inhabitants.” The soldiers w ere also warned not to confiscate property from locals and were threatened with punishment if they violated this order.13 The Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia was the most important factor in shaping the postwar friendship project. It was a singular event for p eople in both countries. For the Red Army, the liberation of Czechoslovakia was distinguished by the high number of casualties sustained—an estimated 140,000 soldiers were killed—and b ecause it was the final theater of b attle after four exhausting years of war.14 But the friendliness of the Czechoslovak
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6 Introduction
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population—in stark contrast to the hostile and fearful reactions from Germans and Hungarians—also made a strong impression. “The people were throwing flowers into the vehicles, shouting ‘Ura!’ [“Hooray” in Rus sian] and ‘Na zdar!’ [“Hello” in Czech] and offering us food and other refreshments,” a Soviet veteran recalled of his regiment’s arrival in the Czech lands via a pass in the Sudeten mountains. He continued, “In one town . . . the column became stuck amidst a dense crowd. Shliakhov, who was standing on the hood of a Dodge truck, tried to reason with the people in Rus sian to bring them back to their senses so they would part and make way for our column. However, the crowd mistook his exclamations and gestures as a salutatory speech and replied with yells of ‘Na zdar!’ and ‘Zet zhie! [Hello! Long live!].’ ”15 Another Soviet veteran remembered, “In no other country that we came to be in during the war, were we, Soviet soldiers, greeted so warmly as in Czechoslovakia. The entire population, but especially the el derly, w omen, c hildren, [and] young ladies threw themselves at us in tears and kissed us, as if we w ere their closest relatives. Such an encounter can never be forgotten.”16 Many Czechs, too, portrayed their encounters with the Soviet soldiers as extraordinary, almost magical experiences. A few days after the liberation of Prague, a Czech journalist depicted a drive he took with a Soviet officer through the capital as if it w ere a love scene in a Hollywood film. As cheering crowds lined the streets offering food, w ater, and bouquets of lilacs to the Soviet troops, the Soviet officer whispered, “ ‘Magnificent p eople . . . you Czechs are a magnificent p eople.’ ” The journalist added, “He clasped my hand. I was so moved that only my heart echoed his words.”17 Czech photo graphs from the liberation highlight this theme of genuine friendship. They show Red Army soldiers playing the accordion and guitar to entertain Czech women, sitting down to drinks at the home of a Czech family, and tenderly holding a succession of Czech babies and young children.18 In the postwar period, the memory of these spontaneous expressions of friendship would lay the groundwork for the official, more scripted friendship project between the two countries. These heartfelt testimonies and images of warm encounters between the Red Army and Czech and Slovak civilians help account for the friendship project’s relative success over the four and a half decades following May 1945. Yet the liberation also had a darker side, which foreshadowed the interplay between friendship and violence that would equally characterize Soviet-
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Introduction 7
Czechoslovak relations for the duration of the Cold War. “The Russians received an enthusiastic welcome when they entered Czechoslovakia, but this brotherly Slavic love and friendship did not last,” alleged a fall 1945 report by the American Army, which had liberated parts of Western Bohemia.19 Even though Red Army troops in Czechoslovakia w ere instructed by their commanders to “behave in a friendly manner,” civilians filed numerous reports complaining of criminal behavior. They accused Soviet soldiers of plundering their homes, stealing food and livestock as well as personal possessions, including jewelry, linens, and clothes.20 Even more damaging to the nascent friendship between the two countries was a rash of violent crimes perpetrated by Soviet soldiers, including rapes and murders.21 These crimes confounded the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), which emerged from the war in a position of unprecedented popularity and political strength. In September 1945 a provincial branch of the party’s friendship society with the Soviet Union, the Union of Friends of the USSR, protested that the Soviet soldiers’ actions were undermining their campaign to enroll new members, “Complaints about their behavior are coming in from many sides. We have tried to make excuses for this behavior at [our] meetings. But how can we explain the foul play that occurred on the night of September 22, 1945, in the village of Gerštorf to the Čech family, when three of its members were fatally wounded? . . . How do we explain to the inhabitants that a Russian lieutenant shot Josef Roubíček, the chairman of the National Committee in Donín, on September 20, 1945?”22 In the Brno region, the district secretary of the KSČ reported, “Every day and night incidents occur from the side of Russian soldiers, who steal, pillage, rape Czech women (not to even mention German w omen).” He highlighted one horrific crime: in the village of Popice, four Soviet soldiers had broken into the postmaster’s house and held him at gunpoint while they raped his wife. These kinds of incidents, the district secretary complained, were tarnishing not only the Soviet Union’s reputation, but also that of its staunchest ally in Czechoslovakia, the KSČ. “Many of our comrades are being poisoned by these kinds of things and have deviated from work for the party, or e lse they go about it lacking in spirit and sufficient taste.”23 Even Joseph Stalin was forced to concede to Czechoslovak leaders that his soldiers were “no angels.”24 Ultimately this tense situation was only resolved by the departure of the Soviet troops, who returned home at the end of November 1945, at the same time as their counterparts from the American Army. By the end of 1945, Czechoslovakia
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8 Introduction
was the only future Soviet satellite state that was not occupied by the Red Army.
The Evolution of Friendship
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Throughout the Cold War, Soviet and Eastern bloc officials used the term “friendship” to describe the relationships among their countries. Friendship was supposed to emphasize the singularity of international relations in the socialist world: to connote alliances based on shared ideology and goodwill, rather than on hard power or realpolitik. In this book, I use the term “friendship project” to describe the strategies Soviet and Eastern bloc officials developed to extend this concept of friendship from the sphere of high politics to the realm of everyday life. T hese strategies included cultural diplomacy, a variety of transnational, interpersonal contacts, and the trade of consumer goods. In the case of the Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance, the nature of friendship between the two countries as well as the terms of the friendship project evolved significantly over the course of the Cold War. This evolution was shaped by important shifts in the countries’ domestic politics and by broader political, social, and cultural changes on both sides of the Iron Curtain. During the short-lived Third Republic in Czechoslovakia (1945–1948), officials from the Soviet Union and the KSČ began to develop the friendship project. The first phase of this project centered on Soviet cultural exports to Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak government was a National Front, consisting of four Czech and two Slovak political parties. The KSČ wielded the greatest power in this coalition: its members headed the Ministries of the Interior, Defense, Information, Education, and Agriculture.25 In June 1945, the Ministry of Information signed a landmark agreement with the Soviet All-Union State Office for Film Export and Import (Soiuzintorgkino), giving Soviet films the right to occupy 60 percent of screen time in Czechoslo vakia’s movie theaters.26 That fall, the Ministry of Education mandated the teaching of Russian as a foreign language in Czechoslovak schools.27 Soviet exports of music, art, and literature further introduced Czechoslovak citizens to their new “friend.” The Soviet government and the KSČ hoped that t hese cultural imports would convince the Czechoslovak public of the need to build socialism. As
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Introduction 9
the Cold War began, the Soviet government and the KSČ also looked to Soviet cultural imports to combat Western influence in Czechoslovakia, particularly from Hollywood films. Instead of promoting socialist internationalism, however, Soviet culture inadvertently bolstered Czechoslovak nationalism. Czechoslovak cultural critics, ordinary moviegoers, and exhibition viewers—even, in private, some leaders of the KSČ—employed Soviet films and paintings, in particular, as foils to define their country as more Western and culturally sophisticated than the USSR. Czechoslovaks thus concluded that their country needed to pursue its own, unique, path to Communism. During the Third Republic the majority of Czechoslovaks considered the need for friendship with the USSR axiomatic, but they unexpectedly attempted to use Soviet culture as a proxy to set the terms of this friendship to their own advantage. Over the course of the Third Republic, the KSČ, supported by Moscow, maneuvered for greater control over the National Front. In May 1946 the party won a plurality in f ree parliamentary elections, with 38 percent of the vote. The KSČ hoped to win a majority in the next set of elections, which were scheduled for the spring of 1948. When it became clear that this was not likely to happen, the party employed extralegal means to augment its control, including stacking the security services with its supporters, and intimidating members of the other parties. In February 1948 the KSČ took power in a coup.28 The stakes of the friendship project immediately intensified. Soviet and Czechoslovak officials now relied on Soviet culture to cement the country’s new position as a member of the socialist world. In the spring of 1948 a split between Stalin and the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito threatened to undermine Soviet hegemony in the nascent Eastern bloc. In response, the KSČ worked in tandem with Moscow to Sovietize most aspects of Czechoslovakia’s political and cultural life, with the slogan, “The Soviet Union Is Our Model.” During the Stalinist period in Czecho slovakia, which lasted until the mid-1950s, the party oversaw a veritable cult of the USSR: rhetoric of “friendship” now largely served as a cover for Soviet domination. Public debates over relations with the Soviet Union were pro ere effectively banned; Czechoslovakia’s hibited. Western cultural imports w movie theaters, libraries, concert halls, and galleries w ere inundated with Soviet socialist realist art, or Eastern bloc imitations. Even cultural exchanges between the two countries were supposed to highlight Soviet supremacy. When the Czechoslovak Army’s musical ensemble toured the Soviet Union
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10 Introduction
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in 1952, Soviet cultural officials criticized it for not performing enough Soviet songs.29 The friendship project was further undermined during the late 1940s and early 1950s by campaigns in the USSR to cleanse the country of foreign influences. As a result, few Soviets and Czechoslovaks, aside from participants in high-level political and cultural delegations, had the opportunity to meet in person, and few Czechoslovaks were allowed to visit the Soviet Union. The one exception was several hundred Czechoslovak students, drawn from the Communist elite, who went to study at Soviet universities and institutes. Soviet xenophobia prevented these young people from fully integrating into life in the USSR; for example, the Soviet government’s ban forbidding its citizens to marry foreigners thwarted transnational romances. Yet the students’ sojourn in the USSR nonetheless taught them important Stalinist political tactics that proved essential for forging—and surviving—the new socialist world. After Stalin’s death in 1953, de-Stalinization in the USSR caused three significant changes to the friendship project in the Eastern bloc. First, cultural contacts among the socialist countries became more reciprocal, based on bilateral exchange agreements. Second, they became more populist, encompassing the broad participation of ordinary citizens in the USSR and its satellites. Third, they became more modern, in convergence with new practices of leisure and consumption developing across the Eastern bloc. In the broader Cold War, the structure of international relations on both sides of the Iron Curtain became yet another form of competition between the superpowers. Soviet officials seized on the allegedly benevolent international relations among the socialist countries to provide a contrast to what they viewed as Western, imperialist practices.30 During Stalinism, the friendship project had been largely aimed at Czechoslovaks, who were supposed to emulate Soviet culture and politics. After 1953, Soviet citizens began to participate in the project more actively. In Czechoslovakia, two friendship societies with the Soviet Union had been founded in the interwar period, and soon a fter the 1948 coup they w ere amalgamated into the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship (SČSP), which became the second largest mass organization in the country, after the Trade Unions. In 1958 the Society for Soviet-Czechoslovak Friendship was founded in Moscow. In the 1950s and 1960s Soviets and Czechoslovaks began to visit each other’s countries as tourists, to correspond as pen pals, and to subscribe
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Introduction 11
to glossy magazines detailing the lives of their foreign “friends.” Friendship propaganda encouraged Soviets to buy Czechoslovak-made underwear, perfume, and shoes, and urged Czechoslovaks to purchase Soviet-made cameras, television sets, and cars. Soviet veterans of the liberation of Czecho slovakia in World War II began to renew contacts with the civilians who had sheltered and cared for them in 1944–1945. Their gratitude to these Czechoslovaks undermined the Stalinist dichotomy of Soviet superiority and Czechoslovak supplication. These new bilateral contacts established more intimate connections between individual Soviets and Czechoslovaks, yet they also revealed politi cal and cultural differences that undermined the larger goal of creating political cohesion in the Communist bloc. In the mid-1960s Czechoslova kia embarked on a series of political and cultural reforms that challenged Soviet authority—and by extension, the friendship project. Soviet tourists who traveled to Czechoslovakia w ere shocked to encounter abstract art, pornography, and hippies, not to mention outspoken guides who praised the United States and Western Europe and denounced the Soviet Union. Back in the USSR, readers of the Czechoslovak-produced, Russian-language magazine Sotsialisticheskaia Chekhoslovakiia (Socialist Czechoslovakia) were exposed to a far more sophisticated consumer culture than was available in the Soviet Union, and to reviews of films and excerpts from Czechoslovak novels that were considered too unorthodox for release in the Soviet Union. The expansion of interpersonal contacts between Soviet and Czechoslovak citizens also revealed new tensions between friendship as a form of state politics, and friendship as a mode of intimate relations between individuals. In their propaganda, the Soviet and Czechoslovak governments claimed that personal friendships between their citizens would help bolster their countries’ alliance. “Friendship between nations is also based on personal friendships between people,” declared Oldřich Pavlovský, Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to the Soviet Union.31 Yet when it came to managing tourism, pen-pal correspondences, and veterans’ relations, Soviet and Czechoslovak officials betrayed fears that such friendships might threaten the stability of the transnational socialist system. Tensions between the Soviet Union and its satellite state came to a head during the 1968 Prague Spring experiment in reform Communism. As the KSČ took the dramatic steps of rehabilitating Stalinist political prisoners,
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12 Introduction
opening the country’s borders, and lifting censorship, Czechoslovakia became the darling of leftists around the world. In response, the Soviet Union ordered a massive invasion. On the night of August 20–21, Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia for the second time in twenty-three years. The invasion might logically appear to have crushed the friendship project, along with the Prague Spring. Yet even as Soviet troops occupied Czechoslo vakia for the next two decades, the friendship project endured. This happened for two reasons. First, Czechoslovak citizens drew on the rhetoric and practices of the friendship project to protest the invasion, and in the process, inadvertently helped the project to survive. Second, Soviet leaders and the government of Gustáv Husák (the first secretary of the KSČ) actively worked to restore the friendship project in order to “normalize” relations between their countries. The two governments’ efforts further blurred the distinction between violence and amity; and hard and soft power that had defined the friendship project since 1945. The Soviet government sent tourists to Czechoslovakia to renew friendly ties, while the SČSP instructed its members to treat the Soviet troops occupying their country as tourists. The Czechoslovak government rewarded supporters of normalization by sending them on “friendship trains” to the USSR. The Soviet government even instructed its troops in Czechoslovakia to participate in the friendship proj ect by playing chess matches and soccer games with local youth. The friendship project became a key component of normalization in Czechoslovakia, and remained an integral part of everyday life up until the Velvet Revolution in 1989. “Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship was a routine thing for me because I grew up with it. It seemed completely normal to me,” a middle-aged Czech recalled of the 1970s and 1980s in a 2009 television documentary.32
Empire of Friends
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The friendship project presents a new way to understand Soviet-Czechoslovak relations, which have remained almost entirely unexplored beyond the realm of high politics.33 It also offers a new way to conceptualize the Eastern bloc as a whole. During the early Cold War, Western scholars understood Soviet relations with Eastern Europe as Sovietization, which they defined as the USSR’s attempt to transform politics and state institutions throughout the
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Plots against Russia
Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism
Eliot Borenstein
Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
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Copyright Š 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP to come]
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Contents
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Russia as an Imaginary Country
ix xiii 1
1. Conspiracy and Paranoia: The Psychopathology of Everyday Speech
30
2. Ruining Russia: Conspiracy, Apocalypse, and Melodrama
53
3. Lost Horizons: Russophobia, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Identity
99
4. One Hundred Years of Sodom: Dystopian Liberalism and the Fear of a Queer Planet
133
5. The Talking Dead: Articulating the Zombified Subject under Putin
180
6. Words of Warcraft: Manufacturing Dissent in Russia and Ukraine
202
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v iii
Conte nts
Conclusion: Making Russia Great Again
237
Notes
243
Works Cited
253
Index
271
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Introduction Russia as an Imaginary Country
You can tell a lot about a community based on what it bothers to censor. By the same token, if you do not know enough about the community doing the censoring, then the choice to ban or expunge looks almost random. A 2011 photo of Hillary Clinton sitting in the Situation Room surrounded by a number of male officials looks inoffensive, at least as an image; an Orthodox Jewish newspaper’s excision of Clinton from the picture makes sense only in light of a prohibition on displaying the female form, even one as demurely pants-suited as Clinton’s (Associated Press). Turning to contemporary Russia, the 2015 decision to prevent screenings of the American film Child 44 looks only somewhat less puzzling. The story takes place at the height of the Stalinist repressions; although there has been a great deal of whitewashing of Stalinism in recent years, pointing out that people were arrested and killed for no good reason is still not forbidden.1 The plot involves the hunt for a serial killer who has been murdering homosexual men, all closeted by definition; outlawed in Soviet
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times, same-sex activity is legal in the Russian Federation, and if the serial murder of men who have been engaging in sex with each other on the down-low constitutes “gay propaganda,” one wonders how many young people can be expected to take humiliated murder victims as their romantic role models. Could the minister of culture perhaps unconsciously be conflating Child 44 with a gay rights group that, by pure coincidence, all but shares its name with the film: Deti-404 (Children-404)? Children-404 advocates for gay teens in a legal climate that renders all such advocacy virtually illegal and takes its name from the error message “404—Page Not Found,” usually displayed when a website is no longer live—or, in the case of LGBT-themed sites, closed down by government order. Although there is delicious irony in the juxtaposition of a story about gay victims of predators and an organization dedicated to help a juvenile population that has been redefined as the target of (gay) predators, irony alone gives no cause to ban a film. Yet banned this film was. Partly, it was a matter of timing: Child 44 was to be released just three weeks before the seventieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, and this particular Victory Day was obviously going to be a monumental celebration (the opening of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi had already set the aesthetic parameters for national historical festivals: solemn commemoration meets Vegas floor show). The Russian Culture Ministry condemned “the distortion of historical facts and original interpretations of events before, during, and after the Great Patriotic War” (Birnbaum). Speaking later to RIA-Novosti, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky made a telling connection between the depiction of history and the country’s very sense of self: “It is important that we should finally put an end to the endless series of schizophrenic reflections of ourselves” (Birnbaum). According to this view, the film is bad because it is a Western distortion of the Russian past, and because it is a continuation of a Russian debate about the essence and fate of Russia. What looks like a contradiction is actually an inadvertent piece of insight about the current media landscape, in which Russia’s own cultural productions have to compete with Hollywood in the creation of an imaginary history for an audience that the elite cannot trust to come to their own conclusions. Indeed, in his condemnation of the (rather obscure) Western fiction that is Child 44, Medinsky invokes The Lord of the Rings, a narrative that has conquered virtually all national boundaries: the movie, he complains,
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portrays Russia as “not a country but a Mordor, with physically and mentally inferior subhumans.” The point here is not to defend Child 44, which is based on a mediocre novel by a man with a shaky understanding of Soviet reality. In the book, the author, Tom Rob Smith, sets himself a perverse task: to develop generically familiar tales of murder and its investigation against the backdrop of state violence on a massive scale. Smith has clearly read the Englishlanguage books about the notorious Soviet-era serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, along with a number of poorly digested potted histories of Stalinism and the gulag. He creates a totalitarian fantasyland based on the one lesson his reading afforded him: the most important thing under Stalin was survival. In his hands, Soviet citizens become cold, efficient survival machines, whose every action is the result of a carefully weighed, logical decision that might be followed by a muted, unemotional discussion. The result is a staggeringly alien one-dimensionality of characterization, as if Dostoevsky’s underground man had emerged from his isolation, spent a few years at the London School of Economics repenting his previous irrational ways, and now set out to apply rational choice theory to human behavior. At times, Smith’s books depict a fascinating world, but I find myself wishing he had embraced the inherent fantasy of his vision, and, like Gregory Maguire in Wicked, moved his meditations on authoritarian regimes to the not-so-merry old Land of Oz. Why does Child 44, whether book or movie, do such a bad job of reproducing Soviet life under Stalin? A number of very simple and plausible answers immediately come to mind: laziness on the part of the filmmakers, the aforementioned faults in the source material, and, most of all, the complete lack of a sense that there is anything in particular at stake. In brief, it’s just a movie. But Child 44 was portrayed as part of a Western plot to slander Russia, presumably by suggesting that homosexuals existed in the Soviet Union before the United States and Europe had the opportunity to exert their pernicious influence. As in the case of the scandal a decade earlier, when Russian legislators were outraged that Dobby, the house elf who debuted in the third Harry Potter film, seemed to display a marked resemblance to Vladimir Putin, Western mass culture provides a useful straw man (“Russian Lawyers”). In each case, the immediate assumption is that nothing is left to chance, and that Hollywood is taking its orders from the White House or the State Department. Russia’s
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fate, it seems, is to be the object of slander and conspiracy at all times. And the purveyors of this conspiratorial worldview see this victimization as a point of pride. The crux here is far more than the tired question of representation and accuracy, nor should we stop at the simple conclusion that Russian governmental officials during Putin’s third term were unnecessarily touchy. Representation suggests something static or iconic and is a category that is too dependent on external, often unverifiable notions of the true essence of the thing represented. If we deal in representations, we can too easily succumb to the dichotomy of “propaganda” vs. “truth,” falling into the very sort of paranoid trap that I hope to investigate. Instead, I would frame the questions raised by the Child 44 incident in terms of narrative and interpretation. Part of the problem is with the narrative that Child 44 appears to provide, but the larger issue is the narrative into which the making and marketing of Child 44 are all too easily assimilated. In each case, we find a question of plot. I am by no means the first critic to point out that the English language provides endless possibilities for word play and interpretive flights of fancy based on the multiple meanings of the word “plot” (the events of a story as elaborated in a narrative vs. conspiracy).2 And if we want to ascribe explanatory power to this lexical coincidence, we must first reckon with the fact that this word play has no equivalent in the language that forms the subject of this book—that is, Russian. The Russian language suggests other tantalizing possibilities, since the word for “plot/conspiracy” (zagovor) is closely linked to terms for faith healing and magic spells. Rather than pretend that etymology has some sort of magical interpretive primacy, I prefer to admit upfront that I am simply taking advantage of the possibilities that English vocabulary affords. The focus of this book is both the power of plot/narrative to model conceptions of Russia’s identity and fate, and the habits of conspiratorial theorizing that are the building blocks of so many of these stories.
Russia and Other Ideas A whole host of objections immediately arise. Don’t all cultures define themselves in terms of story? Is Russia truly unique in its government
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officials’ concern for the country’s image? Is Russian culture being dismissed as “paranoid”? And aren’t conspiracy theories popular throughout the world? My imaginary critics have a point (several of them, actually). On the surface, nothing I have described is difficult to imagine in nearly any other country or culture, and the familiar clichés about the Russian tradition— its logocentrism, for instance—do not get us very far. While there is definitely an argument to be made for conspiratorial thought’s deep Russian roots, conspiracy’s prominence in the past is not a reliable predictor for the present, let alone the future. Instead, we should consider the difficult historical moment that extends from 1991 to the present day. Narrative bears a heavy burden of significance during times of turmoil and transition. These are the moments when a country’s fate and identity appear to be up for grabs. Even more important, these are the moments when narrative consumers, and even the narratives themselves, treat the nation, its culture, and its people with undeniable self-consciousness. North American readers who remember the 1960s and 1970s, even if those memories are secondhand, should be familiar with the often tendentious stories whose claim to fame resides in their examination of American myth. Take, for example, the familiar plot of the road trip. Thanks to the 1969 film Easy Rider, a cross-country journey during this period was, more often than not, a quest to “find America” (a phrase that becomes ironic when translated into Russian, the equivalent of “reinventing the wheel”). Just a little over a decade later, traveling across the country loses its iconic significance. The road trip of Anywhere but Here or Thelma and Louise certainly means something, but it isn’t an ethnographic excursion into America’s heart of darkness. Indeed, if we recall that post-Watergate television and cinema, with their self-critical examinations of malaise and crisis, give way to what Susan Jeffords (Hard Bodies) sees as a triumphalist mode under Reagan, we might find broad parallels with Russia’s cultural scene as it moves from the 1990s to the Putin years. The years following the collapse of the Soviet Union were notoriously difficult, marked by rising crime rates, plummeting living standards, terrorism, and ethnic violence. But this was also an era that could not shake an identity crisis. The country in which the population had spent its entire lives was gone, and even the basic vocabulary for describing the successor
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states and their citizens was unfamiliar and unstable. European empires, such as the one brought down by the Russian Revolution, were guided by God and destiny. The Soviet Union was the fulfillment of the promise of human progress, an unprecedented social experiment aligned with the laws of history (a history which Francis Fukuyama was busily declaring officially defunct). The Russian Federation, like its fellow successor states, was a geopolitical accident, whose borders had been set according to the low stakes of internal cartography—hence the problem of Crimea. What, then, was Russia for? In the debates about Russia and its fate during the Yeltsin era, two terms inevitably recurred: “ideology” and “the Russian Idea.” Discussions about the need for a state ideology, without necessarily endorsing Soviet values, took a Soviet philosophical framework for granted: a powerful state must have an ideology, preferably one made explicit by experts and disseminated through the media and educational system. On the surface, such an orientation resembles contemporary Western critique; scholars from Adorno through the poststructuralists have dedicated much of their work to exposing ideological constructs that circulate as “natural” (questions of race, class, and gender in particular). The Western academic Left exposes ideology in Europe and North America as an act of resistance, while the post-Soviet argument in favor of ideology is in part an act of resistance against a perceived onslaught of foreign ideology (individualism, consumerism), and in part an affirmation that a consciously elaborated ideology both creates and binds communities. In any case, the “ideology” argument had numerous obstacles to overcome, starting with the burdensome connotations of the term itself. The Russian Idea had a much more attractive provenance. As the country’s publishing industry—and, therefore, readers—rediscovered the heritage of Silver Age (prerevolutionary twentieth-century) culture and philosophy, a wealth of books arrived on the shelves with a seven-decade delay, but with an accompanying sense of relevance and immediacy that they would more than likely have lacked had they been part of the cultural conversation during Soviet times. One of the many post-Soviet success stories of Russian prerevolutionary philosophy is the revival of Nikolai Berdyaev, especially his most famous work, The Russian Idea (1946). Both a history of Russian philosophy and a polemical analysis of Russian philosophy, The Russian Idea argued that Russian identity
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depended on a sense of messianic mission, eschatological purpose, and communitarian cohesiveness.3 Berdyaev is helpful not to argue for or against the relevance of his particular notion of the Russian Idea, but rather to note his importance in propagating the idea of the Russian Idea as a discursive structure. The Russian Idea continues to exert a great deal of power as an idea, but in terms of any practical utility, it reached its nadir in 1996, when Yeltsin established a commission of experts to develop a new Russian Idea in the course of a year. The commission’s unsurprising failure, along with the impossibility of resolving disagreements about the Russian Idea in any diverse public forum, is less a matter of intellectual incapacity than it is a sign that the search was being conducted in the wrong place. Russia’s identity was being effectively negotiated and renegotiated in popular and elite narrative. The Russian Idea suggests something static—an image of a country’s purpose or future. Ideology sounds equally disassociated from the passage of time—a set of principles and goals that do not, on their own, tell a story. Yet it is in the form of story, of narrative, that collective fantasies about Russia’s destiny take on their most compelling shape. And, as with most ideological fictions, their fantasies are effectively transmitted to the extent that the stories encoding them capture their audience’s attention. For the purposes of the present study, these fantasies play out in four categories of text (1) Narratives that do not make Russian identity/fate their primary theme, but which nonetheless can be mined for evidence of broader cultural trends. Such texts acquire significance primarily as a function of their number; that is, a broad-based reading of multiple narratives is required to reach even tentative conclusions. This was the approach I used in parts of my previous book, Overkill, and that I apply only sparingly here. (2) Narratives in which reflections on Russia and its role in the world are among the dominant concerns. That is, fictional works in prose, film, or television that are self-consciously preoccupied with the Russian theme, and that in turn demand a similar preoccupation on the part of the audience. (3) Political/philosophical tracts about Russia and “Russianness.” While these works take the form of nonfiction (whether in prose
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Framing these questions in terms of fantasy means steering discussion away from the limited question of historical accuracy (the question raised by Child 44). One of the more dismal points of commonality between theories of postmodernism and the empirical experience of ideological debates in the blogosphere and on social media is the growing irrelevance of the verifiable fact. If facts actually solved arguments, the Internet would be a vastly different place, with no room for animus about, say, global warming or vaccine safety. Debunking a fallacy is less a tool for persuasion than it is a rite of solidarity performed by and for the faithful.4 The narratives discussed over the next several chapters are persuasive in that they tell a persuasive story. Both a right-wing tract and a dystopian novel offer their reader a portable, imaginary Russia that may or may not ring true. Each describes a fantasy world whose effectiveness depends on its congruity with its audience’s prior understanding of the world around them, an understanding that is always already conditioned by earlier fantasy narratives. What I am calling for is a deliberately perverse reading of these texts as exemplars of what looks like the wrong genre. I want to treat realist fiction about the contemporary world either as if it were historical fiction about an imagined past, or fantasy about an imaginary world that bears a striking resemblance to contemporary Russia. When writers turn to a different era (or, for that matter, an exotic land), they can labor under a burden of fidelity that is far more onerous than when setting a work in a default, amorphous present. While historical fiction can be composed in a variety of literary styles, it is instructive that one of the first questions to come to a naive reader’s mind is that of accuracy: Can I trust a given portrayal of the past? And if I can’t, why should I continue to read it? For such a reader, fiction about the past should be both
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informative (letting us know what a given time was “really” like) and confirmative (maintaining verisimilitude in part by not straying too far from the reader’s expectations of the period). On the surface, this looks like conventional realism, but it also resembles what is known in fantasy and science fiction circles as “world building”: constructing an elaborate fictional setting that feels both “lived in” and parceled out. The reader should intuit that there is much more world available than just the part contained in the text. Casual fans of Tolkien can easily sense that The Lord of the Rings has a vast prehistory, while true devotees can avail themselves of the books’ multiple semifinished prequels, which dole out exhaustive fictional historical knowledge and deep aesthetic disappointment in equal measure.
From Second World to Secondary World The conspiratorial fantasies examined here are only sometimes explicitly fantastic in form. The Russian adaptation of the hit British television series Life on Mars, whose twenty-first century protagonist wakes up after an accident to find himself in the body of his father in the Brezhnev era, is an example of the “portal quest” fantasy, in which a traveler from “our” world finds himself in a magical land. Calling the late socialist USSR “magical” is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch, but the rosy nostalgia that has come to surround the “era of stagnation” and the Soviet Union’s status as capital of the Second World, along with the unexplained mechanism by which the hero makes his journey, suffuses the entire series with a sense of the fantastic. As Farah Mendlesohn writes in Rhetorics of Fantasy, “When we think of portal fantasies, we commonly assume that the portal is from ‘our’ world to the fantastic, but the portal fantasy is about entry, transition, and negotiation.” This process of negotiation is one that can lead to insights about both worlds, not just the “other” one. The portal quest guarantees an external perspective to the fantasy world; Narnia’s delights unfold largely in the consciousness of its visitors. Such stories sharply contrast with the other most common form of fantasy narrative, which Mendlesohn calls “immersive.” Here there is no external perspective. As a result, the fantastic in these tales is almost entirely in the
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minds of the reader. Frodo may be unequipped to deal with orcs, and the inhabitants of George R. R. Martin’s Westeros may have grown skeptical about the existence of dragons and the walking dead, but in each case, the characters live in a world where the impossible is defined differently than it is in ours. Frodo does not know that he lives in a fantasy world, but Dorothy is acutely aware that she is visiting one. By extension we can posit that all fiction, including the default realism of most popular and literary fiction, exists in a variation on Tolkien’s idea of the “secondary world”—one that is internally consistent but operates according to different rules from our “primary” world. In realism, the secondary world is constructed to mimic the primary world as closely as possible, and yet it is still a world that is constructed rather than simply found, posited rather than given. Casual discussions of fantasy genres engage in a simple but flexible taxonomy that distinguishes various subgenres and even specific texts according to a simple metric: just how much magic do they contain? Epic fantasy can range from great gobs of magic (as in Tolkien) to relatively little (Martin’s Game of Thrones) to virtually none (Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast), while urban fantasy can combine the veneer of contemporary realism with quasi-Manichaean metaphysics (Sergei Lukianenko’s Night Watch novels), show a mundane world shadowed by various mythological or magical other worlds (almost anything by Neil Gaiman), or exploit the cognitive dissonance inspired by the casual acceptance of one, perhaps two, elements of the traditionally supernatural in an otherwise recognizably mundane world (the early entries in Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series, which inspired HBO’s True Blood). Realism, then, is just a special subcase of fantasy that allows no magic whatsoever, a secondary world that tries its best to pass for primary. For most purposes (and most readers), the constructed nature of the realist secondary world is unimportant. This changes to the extent that the plot seems contrived or the characters’ behavior incomprehensible. But it also changes if the text has a satirical function or serves as social criticism; referring the reader to a social injustice or societal foible requires that the reader will actually recognize the problem as relevant or possible. Ideological, tendentious, or political fictions are immersive fantasies whose secondary world attempts to pass for the reader’s primary world; they are successful when they get their readers not merely to suspend disbelief
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(understood as a prerequisite to successful fantasy since the days of Samuel Taylor Coleridge) but to adopt the belief posited by the fantasy and, if only briefly, reconsider their primary world in terms of the lessons of the secondary. And, as with all immersive fantasies, the lack of an external viewpoint or reader surrogate goes only so far; when we close the book or turn off the screen, we realize that we, like Bilbo, have gone there and back again. As readers, we have traveled to this secondary world whose primary difference from the one in which we live lies in its sheer legibility. The Russia narratives reprocess the primary world, producing an imaginary version that, unlike life, comes equipped with a user’s manual. These narratives explain why the world is the way it is and sometimes indicate what is to be done to change it. The Russia narratives move seamlessly from the descriptive to the prescriptive. And this is what unites the Russia narratives in both their fictional and nonfictional forms. The nonfiction version may claim to be enumerating facts on the path to the revelation of truth, but its purchase depends on its ability to create a cohesive simulacrum of Russia and its place in the world. The nonfiction, like the fiction, is deeply committed to world building. But where nonfiction plays down its resemblance to fiction for the purposes of persuasion, the fiction plays down the polemical in favor of the fictive and the entertaining. In the Russia narratives, the forms of fiction and nonfiction are not in opposition to each other, but rather represent two ends of a spectrum on which the narrative travels.
Epic Fail The political/philosophical tract about Russia’s fate is a laboratory that develops so many of the components found in fiction. Samuel R. Delany provides a helpful framework for us when he chooses to define science fiction and fantasy not in terms of subject matter (robots or unicorns) but grammatical mood, on the very level of the sentence: various flavors of science fiction are conditional/subjunctive (they tell of things that could happen but have not, or things that could have happened but did not), while fantasy is their grammatical opposite (it tells of things that could not happen, could not have happened, and never will) (Delany, 10–12). Ideological tracts erase the difference between the conditional/subjunctive and the
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indicative, passing political fantasy off as a faithful description of Russia’s past, present, and possible future. Fantasy and science fiction as alternative historical moods to the indicative of default realism help us understand the project undertaken by Dmitry Bykov in his wonderfully perverse Living Souls (ZhD): in terms of technology and realia, the novel takes place either in the very near future or an indeterminately flexible present, but it is a present that appears to be a distorted version of our own: after all, since when is Russia a nation whose aboriginal population has receded from view while an age-old conflict between the Varangians (i.e., the Vikings) and the Khazars (i.e, the Jews) turns into full-fledged war? The novel centers on the repeated conquests of Degunino, a small town inhabited by the natives and presenting no real intrinsic value. Nearly all the main protagonists are involved in some form of miscegenation, which, by the end of the novel, may have led to the birth of the Antichrist.5 Closer examination shows that Living Souls is the present-day extrapolation of a centuries-long alternate history. As a popular genre, alternate history usually poses the question “What if a particular crucial historical turning point had been resolved in another fashion?” (hence the most popular subtype of alternate history, often boiled down to the two-word statement “Hitler wins”).6 Bykov’s “what if” is ideological, or rather, a burlesque on ideology instead of a direct engagement with it: what if the blood-and-soil rantings of extreme Russophile nationalists such as Grigorii Klimov, the Eurasianist ethnic fantasies of Lev Gumilev and Alexander Dugin, and Arthur Koestler’s oddly racialized, obsessive identification of European Ashkenazi Jewry with the vanished Khazars were all not simply ideology (i.e., fantasy) but identifiable elements of factual history? Bykov does what fantasy authors have been doing for decades, if not centuries: he writes about the fantastic (what could not happen, or what could not have happened) as if it were the actual (what has happened, and what is happening right now). In so doing, Bykov exploits the tension that such fantasy fiction can provide: by taking ideological fictions at face value (describing them as if they were simply accepted reality), he naturalizes them and denaturalizes them at the same time. The world of Living Souls becomes plausible, to the extent that we live in it for hundreds of pages without becoming hopelessly lost, but is so open to magic, prophecy, and the supernatural that the novel’s conditional believability only reminds
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us of equal feats of verisimilitude: Dugin’s, Klimov’s, and Koestler’s ideas become real, but only to the extent that Narnia becomes real, or Middle Earth proves internally consistent. Living Souls inflates ideology as entertainment and thought experiment but deflates it as a worldview, showing ideology to be just another internally consistent, well-wrought fantasy.7 The implication is that Dugin may be fun to read, but implementing policies based on his writings is analogous to dressing up as Frodo or Gandalf and learning to speak Elvish. When writers engage in this sort of ideological cosplay, they are nearly always collapsing time. Certainly, every futuristic utopia or dystopia inevitably bears the mark of its moment of composition; in the aftermath of the British enclosure of farmlands, Thomas More’s Utopia reflects on agriculture in a way that Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and George Orwell’s 1984 do not. Yet so many of the most noteworthy recent fantasies about Russia’s future are remarkably backward-looking. In addition to Bykov’s focus on Khazars and Varangians in Living Souls, we also have the revival of the policies and mores of Ivan the Terrible in Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik and Mikhail Yuriev’s Third Empire; the resurgence of serfdom in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx, and the resurrected threat of a Fourth Reich in both the multivolume Ethnogenesis series of young adult novels and, less centrally, in the future history Dmitry Glukhovsky began in the transmedia juggernaut Metro 2033.8 Glukhovsky’s underground postapocalyptic Moscow subway even has a union of ring line stations calling itself the “Hanseatic League,” while the Sokolniki (red) line has become the overdetermined home of diehard Bolsheviks. Geography may or may not be destiny, but it is an indispensable accessory. All of this leaves room for a tedious historiographic debate: should Russian history be understood as a set of cyclical, recurring patterns whose regularity can be used for predicting the country’s future? Or is this merely an ideological construct (as well as a possible self-fulfilling prophecy)? Whether or not Russia is doomed to repeat its past, we, fortunately, are not doomed to repeat this debate. Instead, what is important is the persistent habit of seeing such patterns, of interpreting Russian history as if it were all part of a legible plan. Such a habit does more than just foster a sense of pessimistic resignation; it insists on the power of history for both the future and the present, rendering history always immanent.
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Alternate history is a powerful tool in the conspiracist arsenal, allowing conspiracy to become the story of Russia, something of a postmodern national epic. Scholars of Russian literature will recall the Neo-Classicist preoccupation with the national epic in the eighteenth century: it was the one element of the classical constellation of genres that Russia could not provide. Certainly, Russia had folk epics, and, like most Slavic epics, these were stories of defeat rather than triumph. But there was no single unifying story that could serve as a cultural point of origin. Ironically, as soon as one contender appeared (The Igor Tale) it was haunted by accusations of forgery. Russian literature is hardly the poorer for it: would anyone really trade Pushkin or Dostoevsky for a Slavic Beowulf or Chanson de Roland? But the Russian conspiratorial narrative offers a story that always reaffirms Russia’s role as the hero of history while emphasizing its status as the world’s victim or offended party. Alternate history would then be a deliberate falsification that threatens to undermine the very foundations of a commonplace Russian self-perception. But in fact, the goal of alternate history is the opposite. Alternate history, by essentially lying about the nation’s past, is an attempt at strengthening Russian cultural and historical legitimacy. If history, understood as inevitably recurring patterns, takes on the function of national myth, the replacement of reputable history with out-and-out mythology ends up telling an even more compelling story than could be supplied by mere facts. Again, this is the sort of mythmaking that is easier to spot in its natural habitat of pure speculation: one expects to hear about the origin of the world in sacred texts (the Garden of Eden), mythology (Odin’s construction of the world from the corpse of Ymir), and epic fantasy (the formation of Middle Earth by squabbling gods). Yet this obsession with origins is also found in myth’s more prosaic counterpart, utopia (where, often as not, politics and law take the place of divinity and magic). The radiant future of utopia is usually preceded and predicted by a Golden Age, with the point of origin and endpoint serving as bookends for the story of a fallen humanity reclaiming and reinterpreting paradise as part of a secular future history. The communist “withering away of the state” mirrors a posited primitive communitarianism; feminist utopia reinscribes a prehistoric matriarchy; and the imagined triumph of the white race reenacts
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an equally confabulated primordial Aryan purity. The imaginary origin legitimizes the imaginary endpoint. Alternate history serves a similar function, but, in the cases discussed in this book, at a more local level. The broader, international category of alternate history as entertainment is another matter, since the sheer novelty of a different historical outcome can be a sufficient source of textual pleasure. Russia has no shortage of this sort of story, but the high stakes for the Russia narratives become clear when alternate history makes the species jump from novels preoccupied with the rearrangement of historical fact to pseudoscholarship whose organizing principle is the replacement of fact with fiction and the dismissal of all traditional scholarship as conspiratorial fabrication. In this, as in most things, Russia is not unique in producing conspiratorial counterhistories. But, again, the current historical moment is crucial. Since the dismantling of the USSR, counterfactual narratives have flourished, and none more than the New Chronology product spearheaded by the renowned mathematician and stupendous crackpot Anatoly Fomenko. Following in the wake of a series of less-known attempts at chronological revisionism, Fomenko claims to have proven mathematically that history as we know it is a vast falsification. His New Chronology is to history what Young Earth Creationism is to paleontology: all of human experience has unfolded in a hypercompressed timeline. Prehistory began in the ninth century CE, Christ was born in the eleventh century, and the New Testament was written after the Hebrew Bible. Fomenko takes every opportunity available to him to combine a supposedly ancient city even with a more recent counterpart. Thus Jerusalem was actually Constantinople, and “ancient” Greece was really medieval Greece.9 When summarized, the scope of Fomenko’s historical revisionism is misleading. The purpose of Fomenko’s thirty-volume work is to make Russia the hero of history. Marco Polo visited Yaroslavl, and the Scythians, Huns, Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are simply parts of a mammoth Russian Horde. The title of a 2009 book composed with his frequent co-author Gleb Nosovsky puts it best: Christ Was Born in Crimea. And That’s Where the Mother of God Died, Too.10 As with so much of the tendentious fiction to be examined here, Christ Was Born in Crimea would take on new significance after Putin’s national-authoritarian turn
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(along with skyrocketing sales). This is not to suggest that Putin and his advisers were turning to pulp fiction and lunatic fringe pseudoscholarship for direct inspiration, but rather that the margins of mass culture were a comfortable home for ideas that would later move to the mainstream. At the very least, it is a reminder that the policies of Putin’s third term, the seizure of Crimea, and the demonization of Ukraine did not appear out of nowhere. Fomenko’s revisionism has roots going back to Soviet times (which, if we follow his mathematical contortions, probably took place during the first half of 2002). Russia, we should remember, invented the radio, baseball, and even The Wizard of Oz. But before we laugh dismissively at Fomenko’s ravings, it’s worth noting that the attempt to resituate history within local and recent national boundaries looks rather . . . American. Christ’s birth in Crimea fits rather well with the Mormon claim that he visited North America after the crucifixion. And Fomenko’s assertion that Christopher Columbus was a Cossack may argue for a Russian claim to the New World, but it also reminds us of the problematic character of the entire Columbus story: “discovering” a continent where people had been living for centuries.11 As world power latecomers, Russia and the United States share a tendency to see themselves as the heroes of history—and to spin conspiracy theories at the drop of a hat. But where the United States blunders forward in the narcissistic self-confidence of a people unconcerned with the past, Russia has historically been troubled by a preoccupation with origins and legitimacy. Fomenko’s narcissism is neurotic, and it forms the basis of a counterhistory that must be seen as compensatory. Whenever possible, Fomenko’s alternate history rejects the very category of the Other. To call Fomenko’s project imperialist would be an understatement, as he subsumes territorial aggrandizement to semiotic expansionism. For Fomenko, the whole world is Russian.
Welcome to the Deserters of the Real Much of the discussion so far has revolved around terms that are simultaneously common enough not to require definition and so theoretically loaded as to demand a statement of allegiance to one of several possible
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EMPIRE AND BELONGING IN THE EURASIAN BORDERLANDS
Edited by Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London
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Subventions from Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Miami made possible this publication and are gratefully acknowledged. Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America
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Preface vii List of Illustrations ix
Introduction: Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum 1 1. Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands: A Comparative Perspective from the Russian and Ottoman Empires Janet Klein 17 Part One: Negations of Belonging 33
2. Bloody Belonging: Writing Transcaspia into the Russian Empire Ian W. Campbell 35 3. The Armenian Genocide of 1915: Lineaments of a Comparative History Norman M. Naimark 48 4. “Do You Want Me to Exterminate All of Them or Just the Ones Who Oppose Us?”: The 1916 Revolt in Semirech′e Matthew J. Payne 65 5. “What Are They Doing? After All, We’re Not Germans”: Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar Experience in the Caucasus Claire P. Kaiser 80 Part Two: Belonging via Standardization 95
6. Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation: Refugees and Resettlement in the Early Soviet South Caucasus Jo Laycock 97
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vi Cont ents
7. Reforming the Language of Our Nation: Dictionaries, Identity, and the Tatar Lexical Revolution, 1900–1970 Daniel E. Schafer 112 8. Speaking Soviet with an Armenian Accent: Literacy, Language Ideology, and Belonging in Early Soviet Armenia Jeremy Johnson 129 Part Three: Belonging and Mythmaking 145
9. Making a Home for the Soviet P eople: World War II and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod Anna Whittington 147 10. Dismantling “Georgia’s Spiritual Mission”: Sacral Ethnocentrism, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and Primordial Awakenings at the Soviet Collapse Stephen H. Rapp Jr. 162 11. New Borders, New Belongings in Central Asia: Competing Visions and the Decoupling of the Soviet Union Jeremy Smith 182 Conclusion Ronald Grigor Suny 199 Notes 207 Contributors 261 Index 000
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Introduction Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands: Interrogating Nation and Empire Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Preoccupied with the question of belonging, imperial authorities have relied on a variety of approaches to enforce their authority over subordinated peoples and territories, including assimilation and acculturation, rule through difference, delegation, and eradication. Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny interpret this challenge—“ruling variegated populations”—as a definitional component of empires.1 At the same time, nations also often rule “variegated populations” and engage in “imperial” practices such as the physical destruction, deportation, and forced assimilation of peoples even while striving for national homogeneity.2 What then are the differences between imperial and national ways of inculcating a sense of belonging and enforcing its limits? The overlap in the management of differentiated populations raises another question: How does belonging function in a nation as compared with its function in an empire? This might seem like an odd question given the massive historiography devoted to demonstrating the differences between empires and nations.3 Empires according to standard definitions are about hierarchy, differentiation, and subordination;4 nations, meanwhile, are characterized by competing impulses of horizontality, standardization, and equality.5 The relationship between nations and empires is also frequently rendered as fraught. Whereas in nationalist discourse the nation is primordial and predates any empires that have attempted to suppress or rule it, scholars have emphasized the
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creation of nations within and sometimes thanks to empires as well as the role of nationalism in imperial destruction.6 This volume builds on debates about national and imperial frameworks of analysis in the Eurasian borderlands of the Russian/Ottoman empires and Soviet/Turkish states extending to the east and north into Central Asia and Tatarstan. It approaches this vast region as an indeterminate one, intertwined politically, ethno-culturally, environmentally, demographically, and otherwise, rather than as a space divided by hard geopolitical borders. In so doing, it engages with an evolving historiography interested in the transnational networks and circularity of influence, governance, ideas, p eoples, and economies among the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Much of their work focuses on Jadids and other elites, but they have also considered the experiences of Circassians, Crimean Tatars, and other Muslims who fled to the Ottoman Empire, and the “butchers and bakers, craftsmen and students” who traveled through Istanbul Sufi lodges while on the hajj to Mecca.7 Yet another literature focuses on the two world wars, shifting political borders and affiliations, and associated catastrophes (and their aftermaths) visited on the ethnically defined populations situated in these contested borderlands. Identified some years ago as “bloodlands,” these regions more recently and more capaciously have been termed a “shatterzone of empires.”8 Central authorities tend to constitute the main historical agents in such works, although lower level intermediaries, fighting forces, and interethnic jostling receive some attention as well.9 Not ignoring imperial and state authorities, the contributors to our book also turn their attention to the voices and experiences of teachers, linguists, humanitarian officials, refugees, deportees, soldiers, nomads, and those left behind when others are taken away, pushed out, or killed in the multiethnic, bounded—and yet entangled—political spaces of the Russian and Ottoman Empires from the late nineteenth c entury through World War I, and thereafter, the Soviet Union up through its dissolution. This radical expansion of historical personae demonstrates how a broad range of antipathies and affiliations among mutually constituted peoples were enacted (often in circumstances of heightened insecurity and even existential threat). By attending to these actors, by taking seriously their subjectivities, our authors shed new light on the emotional component of imperial and national projects. T hese two large Eurasian formations—and their successor states—were in touch with one another for so long and in such complicated and significant ways that how they structured relationships with their constituent peoples produced examples or models that the other was bound to consider, adopt, or otherwise take into account. Most obviously, state officials worried about losing control over subjugated territories and populations especially when the other side appeared
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to be a better fit or offer a better deal. Belonging thus emerges as a complicated process—not simply mandated or imposed but also inculcated, in certain circumstances negotiated, and in others, flatly denied. While focused on the Eurasian region, this volume offers comparisons with and insights into other parts of the world where national and imperial belongings were generated and negated. Representations of conquered p eoples and the wars that subordinated them had their individual particularities, but, as Ian Campbell indicates in his contribution, the way Russians depicted Tekkes, a nomadic people of the Transcaspian desert plain, bore striking similarities with how defeated Native Americans, Algerians, and the inhabitants of the northwestern frontier of British India were mythologized by U.S., French, and British imperialists. Beyond conquest, the forced sedentarization and dispossession of the conquered Kirgiz discussed by Matthew Payne resembled pro cesses imposed on both the Plains Indians and the peoples of South Africa. As Payne shows, Russian peasant colonists’ attitudes toward Kirgiz also mimicked the blatant racism of other white settler communities. The most extensive comparisons in our volume concern the Armenian Genocide, the subject of Norman Naimark’s essay. Each instance of genocide has had its specificities, its long and short histories. Naimark analyzes the Armenian Genocide as a prototype that can help us understand commonalities across genocides and ultimately further attempts to anticipate and interdict them. In this volume we speak of borderlands rather than borders not only to highlight the frequent shifts in the drawing of lines by respective imperial and state authorities, but to emphasize the ways that ethnic, national, and imperial identities formed and reformed in relation to each other. Geographic, topmountains and valleys, steppe ographic, and economic circumstances— grasslands, proximity to or remoteness from maritime and land-based commercial routes—also helped s haped t hese identities. Borderlands or, as Charles ere thus Maier recently noted, “frontiers at the edge of an expanding empire w zonal, not linear—more regions of cultural and ethnic osmosis than firm barriers.”10 Empire is the most contentious term in our title, particularly in relation to the Soviet Union. The preponderance of specialists now view the Soviet Union as having comprised an empire, an anti-imperialist state that nonetheless exhibited imperial qualities. In earlier iterations, the Soviet Union was a prison filled with primordial nations that would one day realize their destiny as inde pendent nation-states. It was an empire dominated by Russians who perpetuated old imperial hierachies, exposing the emptiness and artificiality of Soviet nationhood and brotherly love.11 In 1993, Ronald Suny intervened in this lit erat ure to recast the USSR in a different role. To Suny, the Soviet Union was
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still an empire, but it was one that had fostered nations and in so d oing brought about its own demise.12 In a Soviet Union where empire and nation co-existed and mutually reinforced one another for so long, Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical attempt to redefine Soviet politics and society snapped the ties that bound Soviet nations to the larger project. Not all have seen it this way.13 In relation to Soviet Central Asia, scholars have debated not only the nature of imperial rule, but w hether the category of empire is at all applicable. As Adeeb Khalid writes, “Colonialism indeed lies at the center of debate in the post-Soviet historiography of Central Asia.”14 In this region, tsarist rule came late and was characterized by significant differentiation between metropole and periphery. In what was then known as Turkestan, it was further marked by a colonial form of imperialism more similar in many ways to western overseas colonies than to the rest of the empire.15 Several scholars have extended colonial (and postcolonial) theorizing to the Soviet era.16 In his study of Soviet unveiling campaigns in Uzbekistan, for example, Douglas Northrop places early Soviet Central Asia in conversation with European overseas colonialism. He identifies a paradox in the unveiling campaign; Soviet authorities “expressed colonial power” and “applied cultural coercion to reinscribe colonial differences,” while simultaneously battling the legacy of tsarist colonialism. Northrop further juxtaposes Soviet authorities’ integrative and “civilizing” policies with the differentiated approach of British officials in India.17 Adeeb Khalid, meanwhile, has been more skeptical about the saliency of empire and colonialism as categories of analysis in early Soviet Central Asia. He has argued that the USSR embodied a “different kind of modern polity, the activist, interventionist, mobilizational state that seeks to sculpt its citizenry in an ideal image.” To Khalid, Soviet officials’ modernizing cultural agenda was more akin to the Republic of Turkey than to British India.18 Others similarly suggest that the Turkish comparison is key for understanding the character of nationhood and empire in the Soviet context. Adrienne Edgar, for example, draws parallels with Kemalist Turkey—but also Iran and Afghanistan—in the early Soviet design and enactment of emancipation politics in Central Asia. She finds that, at least in this realm, the Soviet authorities aimed to “create a modern, homogeneous, and mobilized population” and acted as representatives of a nation-state rather than a colonial empire. But, as with Northrop, she leaves room for thinking about the Soviet Union as an empire in “broad terms” and, more specifically, as a colonial empire—with Central Asia more akin to European colonies in the M iddle East and North Africa—when it comes to the dynamic that developed in reaction to this emancipatory agenda.19 Ultimately, Edgar concludes that the Soviet Union “was
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neither an empire nor a unitary state but had features of both.”20 This ambivalent approach to Soviet colonialism remains the norm in the field, according to Moritz Florin. While he proposes that the foreignness of the Soviet system to the indigenous majority most clearly links it to colonial paradigms, he also concludes that recent scholarship, “remind[s] us of the futility of any attempt to accept or deny unequivocally the colonial nature of Soviet rule in Central Asia.”21 Our contributors’ attention to Anatolia, the Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Central Asia enables us to include an additional dimension of belonging and its contestation, namely, how Europe figured not just as a physical presence but as an imagined one. The idea of Europe provided a standard by which people judged their own and others’ behavior. As imperial expansion came to define the European civilizational world, elites on the edge of that sphere—in both the Ottoman and Russian Empires—considered their imperial pursuits to be qualifying components of their Europeanness. This influence extended into multiple sociocultural and political spheres as European standards and practices permeated both the arts and sciences (including military “science” as practiced either on another European country or indigenous peoples far from Europe). Even when nationalist-tinged reactions or later Soviet claims of superiority complicated identification with Europe, the implicit standard remained European for many people. Large state formations generally encompass smaller delineations of p eoples and territories defined in religious, national, ethnic, geographic, class, or other terms, producing many possibilities for belonging. Some of these can be mutually reinforcing, some antagonistic, and some generative of new affinities. What made belongings in the Eurasian borderlands of the late nineteenth and ere the revolutions that distwentieth centuries even more complicated w rupted old loyalties and produced new ones, often creating fateful divisions among families and generations. Working both sides of the revolutionary divide, several chapters in this book track corresponding shifts in affinities. In the Soviet context, for example, class functioned as a newly ascribed—and in the case of the working class, privileged—identification that could enable people to escape from anterior and less advantageous associations. Belongings and exclusions multiplied even further as collectivities developed their own internal divisions, but also built connections across categories and scales. Once considered part of the “Eastern Question” and subjected to Euro peans’ Orientalist gaze, the peoples on either side of the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman/Turkish borders are shown to have had their own longings and identifications; their capacity to push back against but also selectively absorb
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imperial and national initiatives is what, in other words, makes them complicated subjects of belonging.
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It turns out that in compiling a collection of essays about belonging in Eurasia, we have produced a book that privileges its negative aspects and consequences. Although unintentional, this finding perhaps should not be surprising. That minorities on both sides of the border were produced, suppressed, and excised is well-known. Further, the so-called dark side of empires and nations has attracted increasing attention in recent years. What this book emphasizes are the ways that belongings were mutable, durable, and s haped across revolutionary divides, geopolitical borders, and political configurations. Careful not to assume an a priori dichotomy, the authors interrogate the mutual shaping of empire and nation, indeed, the ways one inscribed itself in the other. They note the persistence and frequency of coercive measures that imposed belonging or denied it to populations deemed inconvenient or incapable of fitting in. To label such techniques imperial even when enacted in the national context draws attention to overlapping features of these phenomena, but at the same time can obscure one of the most essential characteristics of nations and nationhood. Nations must take ownership of their own behaviors, irrespec hether they emerged from disintegrating empires or enjoyed autontive of w omy and power within them. The prominence of violence (or at least conflict) in relation to how t hese empires and nations handled matters of belonging reflects the volume’s temporal parameters—from the late 1870s to the early 1990s. This period starts well before Eric Hobsbawm’s “short twentieth century,” including as it does, predatory claims to Ottoman lands and revolutionary upheaval. Had we included essays on earlier eras, they undoubtedly would have stressed greater autonomy among borderland inhabitants, looser borders, and different ways of conceptualizing and managing ethno-confessional differences in those spaces. As for the terminal date, it remains to be seen what will happen to the nation-state option that emerged from the Soviet Union’s breakup given per sistent neo-imperial predation and rival ethno-national territorial claims. Turning to the chapters themselves, part of the process of producing minorities, as Janet Klein underscores in chapter 1, was to conceptualize difference in new ways. Diversity of ethnicity, language, and religion, accommodated in earlier centuries by the granting (or acceptance) of autonomous institutions, did not entail formalization of minority status. That came fatefully in the nineteenth century with a more modern conception of the state and international relations. We have placed Klein’s chapter first b ecause it prefigures in so many ways the double-sidedness of imperial and national belongings analyzed in vir-
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tually all the other chapters. Klein, for instance, follows Eric Weitz in tracing how the discourse of minorities lent itself to intricate and contradictory connections between minority protection and forced deportation, becoming, as Weitz puts it, “two sides of the same coin . . . an entirely new way of conceiving of politics focused on discrete populations and the ideal of national homogeneity u nder the state.”22 Before violence could be done to a p eople, they had to be identified as such and their loyalties questioned. Klein defines this as “minoritization.” The protections offered and sought from abroad could serve, especially in times of war, to increase antipathy t oward now-suspect peoples. Klein’s chapter is animated by a desire for historians to be more conscious of the historicity of the terms they use. As she points out, both the Ottoman and Russian Empires had their own specificities in how they came to identify and administer constituent peoples as minorities, but both empires’ population politics w ere driven by greater anxiety about w hether those p eoples belonged. The “growing concern on the part of Russian authorities with loyalty and threat, and sorting out which groups could ultimately be incorporated (i.e., assimilated) into the Russian nation-in-the-making” had its parallel among the Young Turks. As Russian and Turkish nationalisms intensified along with international tensions, so did the “markedness” of the “marked citizens,” a term of Gyanendra Pandey’s invention that Klein recommends for adoption in these contexts. Klein concludes by noting that the new states erected on the ruins of these empires defined themselves—and therefore their constituent “elements”—differently: the Soviet Union’s state of nations versus Republican Turkey’s nation-state. Yet minoritization persisted in both cases with nontitular peoples pressured, on pain of assimilation, expulsion, or other forms of violence to accommodate to the processes of national consolidation via standardization and mythmaking. The chapters in part I build on Klein’s theorizing of minoritization by tackling the negation of belonging, the ways in which a variety of actors— national and imperial officials, military officers and soldiers, and colonizing settlers—have decided that o thers do not belong to “their” nation, empire, republic, or territory and enacted t hese exclusionary visions through mass killing, genocide, terror, erasure, and forced deportation. Although these acts of violence and excision are distinguished by their extremity, they do not stand alone but rather exist in a continuum of other practices. As the chapters in this section show, groups, identifications, and categories have been constructed, counted, reified, and ascribed not only to build communities and belongings but also to determine who is formally and informally excluded from those collectivities and through those exclusions further define and sustain the “in”
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group. The stories that perpetrators tell are an integral part of the processes of elimination and its erasure. Targeted peoples are conceptualized as dangerous and incompatible with the nation or the empire, and very often conflated with enemy others at the same time that they are constructed as enemies themselves. And, contrary to some expectations or stereotypes of the Eurasian region and its various political formations, the impetus for and enactment of elimination has been multinodal rather than emanating only from the center.23 This is the case not only for the implementation of policy but for the generation of those policies and practices as well. Ian W. Campbell (chapter 2) first turns our attention to the conquest of the Tekke Turkmen and the seizure of their lands by the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth c entury. Placing Tekkes in a comparative global context, Campbell theorizes the discourses that enabled their conquest and brutalization by Russian soldiers and, more passively, the Russian public. Tekkes were conceptualized as a dangerous, potentially treasonous borderland force whose superhuman strength and indifference to normal h uman suffering demanded that the Russians be “bold” and decisive in their attack. Yet this was not a genocidal offensive wherein the Russians sought to eliminate Tekke Turkmen in whole, or even in part, as a people. Rather, they sought to “punish rather than exterminate, to shape events in a direction conducive to maintaining unequal multiethnic rule on the borderlands.” Indeed, there was a place reserved in the empire for Tekkes who submitted and accepted the “mercy descended to them from the tsar and his agents.” T hose ere the ones whose elimination was required to teach who did not belong w the remaining Tekke this lesson, and those who refused to accept the tsar’s grace by submitting to the empire. This enactment of violence helped the empire to expand, but it was also an act of self-definition. After a series of military setbacks, Russian tsarist officers and others hoped that this victory over “Asiatics” would fortify the Russian Empire’s place in European civilization. Whereas Campbell explores the physical and conceptual violence of the Tekkes’ conquest and mass murder, Norman M. Naimark (chapter 3) and Matthew J. Payne (chapter 4) tackle that practice of excision that aspires to or results in the elimination of a people through mass killing and other practices—genocide. The applicability of this specific crime to Russian and Soviet history is open to debate. In the early modern and imperial periods, various peoples experienced massacres; the destruction of nomadic, mountain, and other lifestyles and economies incompatible with imperial prerogatives; pogroms; forced resettlements and expulsions; ethnic cleansing; and other forms of violence. Yet the crime of genocide is rarely applied to these
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periods of Russian history, and many books and articles where you would expect to see a discussion or conceptualization of genocide or genocidal vio lence remain awkwardly silent on the m atter.24 Robert Geraci, one of the few scholars who takes on this question, concedes that t here w ere genocidal “ideas” and “fantasies” in imperial Russia, but also notes that “genocidal impulses or fantasies are certainly not tantamount to crimes” and prevaricates about whether or not genocide actually occurred.25 He locates the most convincing case for genocide in the Jewish experience, but, even there, concedes only that it would “seem to constitute genocide according to [Raphael] Lemkin’s definition.”26 The question of genocide in the Soviet context has played out more contentiously. On the one side are t hose who adopt a more capacious definition of genocide dependent on Lemkin’s original vision, and, on the other, those who believe that genocide is a specific legal crime defined by rigorous par ameters. In the latter’s view, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, massacres, political purges, and other forms of mass killing and cultural destruction are distinct crimes that do not need the label of genocide in order to be condemned. In his book on the Armenian Genocide, for example, Ronald Suny argues that genocide “might more accurately be referred to as ‘ethnocide’ ” because “Genocide is not the murder of people but the murder of a people.”27 The 1932–33 famine in Ukraine during collectivization has sparked perhaps the most developed arguments in this debate, but viewing this case in conjunction with simultaneous famines in the Volga region, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan (where a greater proportion of the population died) complicates the argument that Soviet government actions resulted in or w ere crafted to achieve the extermination of the Ukrainian people as a people.28 Naimark and Payne analyze incidents of mass killing carried out in neighboring Eurasian empires—Ottoman and Russian—that would soon be replaced by the modern Turkish state and Soviet Union. World War I occupies a par ticular role h ere as it harbored an explosive quality that helped to destroy imperial forms of belonging and radicalize relationships and behaviors that culminated in mass murder in the broader region. As Naimark shows, the Armenian Genocide is a good example of how historical events extend beyond imperially and nationally bounded narratives in this region. Russia certainly played a role in this story as the empire positioned itself as a political, conceptual, and military threat to Ottoman sovereignty in the eastern borderlands. The Ottoman Armenians’ close proximity to the Russian Empire (including Russian Armenians), as well as Russian incursions into the region and Ottoman Armenians’ appeals to the international community, increased the threat perception among Ottoman authorities and contributed to the gradual
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construction of the Armenian people as an ungrateful and disloyal enemy “other” in the Ottoman Empire. The violence of the genocide also extended into the Russian Caucasus as the mass flow of Armenian refugees and, later, Russian imperial collapse and the advancing Ottoman army disrupted the region’s already sensitive demographic, political, and social balance. In chapter 3, Naimark is preoccupied with one of the most disturbing and key aspects of mass murder: What accounts for the devolution into extreme— and often intimate—violence?29 He sees this as a question of “bloodlust,” which he explains as “the welling up of murderous behavior on the part of the perpetrators, unleashed, in virtually all cases, by political leaderships, yet prompting normal men and women to pursue their victims beyond what has been ordered or is necessary.” In the case of the Armenian Genocide, he recognizes what Suny has termed “affective disposition,” but also “cold and brutal calculation” that leads him to the disturbing conclusion that “under certain circumstances, human beings, all h uman beings, are capable of horrible acts against their fellows.” Payne’s contribution in chapter 4 intersects significantly with Naimark’s in its attempt to unravel and understand the gratuitous and excessive degeneration to mass killing and torture in the Semirech’e region of colonial Turkestan during and after the 1916 rebellion. Yet again, the question of belonging is at the heart of this narrative as Kirgiz, government representatives, and Rus sian settlers jockeyed over the lands and bodies of the native inorodtsy Kirgiz population.30 Who had a legitimate attachment or belonging to the land and to the tsar? For Payne, what happened in Semirech’e was similarly “triggered” by war, but also reflected a particular form of violence found in other settler colonial societies. Governmental and settler interests, actions, and aims diverged from one another in this borderland region. Throughout the suppression of the rebellion, the imperial government continued to view Kirgiz through an imperial lens. They belonged to and had utility for the empire and thus the state sought to cure them of their rebellious ways in a punitive rather than exterminatory manner. Not dissimilar to their treatment of Tekkes, imperial authorities pursued, in Payne’s words, “devastating collective punishment but not genocide.” These imperial agents, however, were blind to the “emerging civil war ethos” among the peasant colonists and in collaborating with them to suppress the Kirgiz people ultimately “empowered génocidaires and enslavers.” As the imperial state crumbled, settlers, garrison troops, and Cossacks who had been armed to put down the rebellion seized control of the emergent soviets in the region and used this newfound power to abuse and kill the local Turkestani
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population u ntil the Bolshevik leadership in Petrograd reasserted control and, once again, reshaped the local landscape of violence and belonging. The final chapter from this grouping on excision (chapter 5) comes from Claire P. Kaiser, who explores a different type of expulsion, one that resulted in massive displacement, trauma, and sociocultural disruption but not the mass death and killing that marked the previous chapters. Kaiser is interested specifically in Operation Volna, the post–World War II forced exile of accused Dashnaks; Turkish citizens, stateless Turks, and former Turkish subjects with Soviet citizenship; as well as Greek subjects, stateless Greeks, and former Greek subjects with Soviet citizenship from the South Caucasus. These peoples were deported into the interior of the Soviet Union not for perceived or real war time betrayals, but b ecause their “type” no longer belonged in a once multiethnic borderland region that was increasingly homogenizing under the aegis of Soviet nation-building. As with other contributors, Kaiser delves into the interconnectedness of the Ottoman/Turkish and Russian/Soviet experiences. For several years, Georgian and other Soviet authorities pursued deportation as a means to cleanse the Soviet-Turkish border region of potentially traitorous elements characterized as such for their Turkic or Muslim heritage. T hese populations were essentialized in ways that made them suspect and potentially disloyal, showing that the securitized physical border between the two states continued to be a conceptually insecure space and that state policies continuously reinforced the primordialization of nationalities and identifications in the USSR. As in other cases explicated in this volume, Kaiser finds that local agents went “above and beyond” what the center demanded of them. Local, titular officials played an outsized role in deportations as they lobbied for, embraced, and helped to enact and sustain these expulsions and cleansings of the republican populations. The chapters in part II cluster around the theme of standardization. Pro cesses of standardization figure as significant features of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultural and economic history. Let us recall that international recognition of the Greenwich meridian marking both zero degrees longitude and Greenwich Mean Time date from an international convention held in Washington, D.C., in 1884. Inspired by technological advances in telegraphy and both nautical and railroad transportation, the convention was one of many to standardize hitherto local and protean practices. Successive congresses held in Paris between 1881 and 1900 adopted standard units in electrical current (ohm, volt, ampere, joule, e tc.).31 Additional standardization efforts bore fruit at the national level. The founding in 1901 of the National Bureau of Standards by an act of the United States Congress followed German
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and British examples. Soon, Frederick Winslow Taylor was promoting the standardization of workplace procedures with his principles of scientific management (or, as it became more popularly known, Taylorism), and within a few years, Henry Ford would be promoting the interchangeability of parts as an essential element of assembly-line production.32 Refugee policy might seem an odd application of standardization princi ples, but, as Jo Laycock shows in chapter 6, it provided the “common ground between the approaches of the Soviet Union and ‘western’ international organ izations” to such burning issues as how to deal with displacement, resettlement, and national belonging. Focusing on Soviet Armenia, she reveals a rather surprising degree of cooperation between Soviet and international institutions based on shared “sedentarist” thinking. Among international personnel, Fridtjof Nansen, the first High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, developed perhaps the most ambitious of resettlement schemes, inspired by visions of scientific farming communities and, as Laycock notes, “premised on standardization, predictability, and the erasure of individual agency or preference.” These desiderata dovetailed with Soviet-initiated efforts to colonize the steppe with displaced populations as well as its broader nationality policy. That policy—well-known from the work of Terry Martin, Francine Hirsch, and others—promoted indigenization (korenizatsiia) with its implicit acknowl edgment and endorsement of national rootedness.33 But since their displacement from the eastern Anatolian provinces during World War I, Armenians embodied uprootedness. Whatever reservations or hostility that clerics, Dashnak nationalists, and others might have borne, the Sovietization of what had been briefly independent Armenia and the resettlement of tens of thousands of Armenians realized both Moscow’s agenda and that of the international organizations that provided badly needed logistical and financial support. At the same time though, a consolidated Armenia made the presence of non-Armenians—the variously described “Muslims,” “Tatars,” “Tiurks,” and “Turks”—less appealing for a variety of local representatives. Laycock stresses that Soviet authorities did not explicitly countenance expulsion, but w hether those minority populations really “belonged” to and would be accommodated in the newly defined national territory remained an open question. Laycock builds on Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell’s understanding of how nations emerged from within formerly Imperial Russian territory and Benjamin White’s similar approach to formerly Ottoman lands. The key point h ere is that in transforming displaced peoples into settled communities, refugee authorities could recodify them according to standards of their own choosing. Standardization may not have been motivated by imperial ambitions; its
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objective may have been (and apparently was for Nansen) greater legibility to simplify and reduce the costs associated with gargantuan humanitarian tasks. But intentional or not, its enhancement of national territorial identification emanated from supranational impulses. Both Daniel E. Schafer (chapter 7) and Jeremy Johnson (chapter 8) analyze in fascinating ways the standardization of national languages and cultures, respectively, in Tatarstan and Armenia. Since Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking and often-cited work, historians of national projects have emphasized the importance of linguistic codification in promoting national identifications and cohesion.34 Schafer reminds us that dictionaries play an essential role in this process, acting like scythes cutting through thickets of regional variants, antiquated words, and unlicensed importations of foreign terms. What makes the cases taken up by Johnson and Schafer comparatively rich are the multiplicity of options for spelling and orthography and their associated political implications. Johnson demonstrates that choices about linguistic standards pitted Soviet Armenian authorities who favored a simplified version of the unique Armenian script against international aid workers who “exoticized” it as “ancient and primitive.” Curricula were similarly contested. The conflation of linguistic and political standards thus haunted discourses of literacy and belonging. Some of these issues may have been “soft-line,” as Terry Martin has atters and associated bureaudubbed the party’s delineation of second-order m cracies, but for teachers, literacy activists, and t hose they taught, much was at stake.35 What made “speaking Soviet”—which Johnson defines as “the production of state-sanctioned language”—so complicated, w ere the contradictory implications of adopting new vocabularies often based on standard international roots. On the one hand, distancing Armenians from older terms demarcated them as Soviet; on the other hand, it made the new mandated language less intelligible to the masses. Speaking Soviet also meant becoming familiar with and more comfortable using scientific terms that came to define literacy. In citing the intriguing example of an article from an early Soviet Armenian women’s magazine on reproductive organs, Johnson illuminates how notions of citizenship and civic participation w ere inscribed onto women’s bodies. The language of the Tatars inhabiting the M iddle Volga-Ural region underwent several different revolutions in the twentieth century. Schafer’s fascinating tour of the landscape entails both the succession of orthographic regimes (from Arabic to Latin and then to Cyrillic) and the radical shifts in word content that progressively reduced the proportion of Arabic and Persian entries in favor of Russian and international ones. Each iteration, Schafer argues, is indicative of the politics of the moment, w hether the Jadidism of the early
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years of the century, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s, or the Rus sianizing policies of the late 1930s. Each would have major implications for the mutual intelligibility and cultural affinities between Tatars and other Turkic-speaking peoples of the Soviet Union, Anatolian Turks, and Tatars in the diaspora. Each, couched in terms of standardization and modernity, was represented as an improvement on its predecessor, and each alienated a new segment of the population from Tatar literacy. Yet another means of inculcating a sense of belonging within both nations and empires has been termed “mythification,” the construction of narratives based on the attribution of heroic qualities (addressed in the chapters of part III). As Pierre Nora’s foundational if controversial works have demonstrated, both space and time figure importantly in such narratives.36 The (home)land, often rendered in sacred terms and full of what Nora called “lieux de mémoire,” aroused feelings of love and protectiveness, its violation by an enemy inspiring acts of patriotism. In the case of the Soviet Union—but also, the United States, for another example—spaciousness was important to the myth of national/imperial destiny. With it, came geological and climatic variety that encouraged imaginings of universality.37 As for time, both nations and empires have mythologized ancient if not primordial origins, but whereas empires have tended to stress continuity (as in dynastic inheritance), nations often incorporate into curricular education and ceremonial occasions narratives of rupture and reconstruction or recovery.38 Heroes and martyrs were essential as models and sources of inspiration. They could be ancient, as in epic narrative poems (byliny) about knights-errant (bogatyri) that originated orally among eastern Slavs, or quite recent, indeed, contemporary. Lavr Kornilov, he of the “Affair” of 1917, was one such late imperial hero. Born in Central Asia to a Siberian Cossack father and a Kazakh (or, in other versions, Kalmyk) m other, he served in the Russo-Japanese War, along the empire’s southeastern borders with Afghanis tan and China, and then in World War I. His capture by the Austrians in 1915 precipitated a daring escape and return by foot to Russia, where he received a hero’s welcome. In the revolutionary conditions of 1917, he cut a strange figure—emphasizing his democratic origins on the one hand, but surrounding himself on the other with his own bodyguard of Tekke Turkmen (descendants of those slaughtered by Russian soldiers in 1881, as described by Ian Campbell) who, “dressed in scarlet robes, . . . called him their ‘Great Boyar.’ ”39 Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii describe Kornilov and Lenin as objects of dueling cults reflective of the increasing polarization of 1917. After the October Revolution, the fledgling Soviet state promoted cultlike veneration of labor, the proletariat, science, and deceased revolutionaries, but only after Len-
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in’s death in 1924 would his life and works obtain cult status. The relationship of the Lenin and Stalin cults was synergistic—the latter fed off the former via the mythification of their personal relations.40 Anna Whittington (chapter 9) demonstrates, though, that all the while a different subject for mythmaking, also born of the October Revolution, was taking shape—a collective subject that received its baptism on July 6, 1935, when Nikolai Bukharin, editor of Izvestiia, extolled in that newspaper “the Soviet people.” This construct was the most capacious within the Soviet lexicon. It dwarfed the proletariat on the one hand, and the “enemies of the p eople” on the other. It was, Whittington argues, both national and imperial; it asserted equality and social cohesion even as, in the context of “persistent inequalities,” it emphasized diversity. As prospects for war increased, homogenization played a larger role in the mythical unity of purpose; so too did the cooption of patriotic figures from the Russian imperial past. But, as Whittington stresses, the acid test came with the war itself, and, despite the shock of initial defeats and the horrors of occupation, displacement, and deprivation, “the Soviet people”—both as a construct and a reality—survived and, it would seem, helped the disparate peoples (narody) of the USSR identify with its war effort. What the war did, among other things, was to displace millions of evacuees from the western borderlands and capital cities to the interior of the country, including Siberia and the Central Asian republics.41 In the process, European-influenced practices and practitioners could displace indigenous personnel, consequently heightening tensions between them. Whittington’s analysis of the ways that the myth of the Soviet people during the war diverged from p eoples’ realities is essential to any account of how the war’s legacy not only sustained but also haunted the Soviet project. Whatever the degree of divergence was in this case, Stephen H. Rapp Jr. (chapter 10) demonstrates that it pales in comparison with the relationship between Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s highly charged version of Georgia’s history and what can be independently verified about that nation’s past. It would not do, however, to simply dismiss Gamsakhurdia’s fanciful representation as the ravings of a nationalist historian bent on distorting Georgia’s past for political purposes. The collapse of Soviet authority, and with it the long-dominant myths of the Soviet people and the friendship of the peoples, created an opportunity and a felt need among nationally minded intellectuals to invent new national ideas or revive old ones.42 In Rapp’s assessment, Gamsakhurdia’s 1990 “mission” statement is a particularly striking example of the grammar of national mythmaking. Its equation of longevity with legitimacy, identification of Georgia as the original European nation and the “Caucasian race” as the genus from which sprang other national species, and assertion of the country’s
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divine (Mother of God) origins—all this is familiar as the stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century national mythmakers. So too, unfortunately, is the “clash of civilizations” motif pitting Georgia as the redoubtable Christian outpost against a series of threatening Muslim neighbors, which also has contemporary resonance. Contesting Ernest Renan’s dictum about the necessity of a nation forgetting many t hings, Benedict Anderson remarked that what “can not be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated.”43 Both Anna Whittington’s and Stephen Rapp’s contributions suggest that mythmaking consists of constructing narratives that connect the past to the present in ways that suture over inconvenient or disruptive elements. But what happens when, as in the case taken up by Jeremy Smith (chapter 11), the state or empire to which nations have belonged suddenly ceases to exist? Smith addresses not those nations roiled by popular mobilization for greater sovereignty or outright independence, but, appropriate to the purpose of this volume, the five Central Asian republics that had inde pendence thrust upon them. There, as he points out, several possibilities existed for new post-Soviet belongings: the maintenance of a subordinate relationship with Russia; a regional bloc unto itself; a broader Turkic-Iranian space; and/or affinities based on Islam. “In the event,” he writes, “none of these prevailed, and national belonging came to predominate.” How and why did this come to pass? One of Smith’s insights is that in many respects Union republics already were acting as independent entities before the formal breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991. He also notes that Central Asian political leaders w ere not shy about asserting their own republics’ territorial integrity and economic interests during the fluid months before and after formal independence. Yet a third factor was the implosion of Communist Party power in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Rus sia’s subsequent unpredictability. Ultimately, the process Smith analyzes as “decoupling” depended on contingencies that we may still be too close to discern. But, as he observes citing Suny, we would do well not to underestimate the emotional power of nationalism especially in the wake of a country to which nobody any longer belonged. What this book offers then are discrete and in-depth soundings of the nature and limitations of belonging within two empires that competed for loyalties, collapsed in war and revolution, and w ere replaced by states that inculcated and demanded new modes of belonging. We hope that taken together, t hese soundings inspire new thinking about the complicated relationship between imperial and national belongings not only in the Eurasian borderlands but in other contested territories.
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